


No Hope for the Weary

by girlbookwrm



Series: The Hundred Year Playlist [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes and the 21st Century, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Slow Burn, Swearing, almost, because sometimes the only way forward is by screaming obscenities, blueballs iditarod, canon compliance doesn't have to suck, continental drift, i have my duct tape and my chewing gum and i am here to patch that mess together as best i can, part five: these pine logs are almost dry enough to catch fire now, so much swearing, softe assassin learns to take care of himself: the fic, starting a fire with two wet sticks, we need a phrase stronger than slow burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-05-23 11:56:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 44,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14933804
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlbookwrm/pseuds/girlbookwrm
Summary: It is a sunsoaked afternoon, and he is tired all the way down to his bones. He can hear the softscritch-scratch-scritchof Steve’s pencil on paper, and faintly, distantly, someone listening to Glenn Miller.(This is the Soldier-Asset-Bucky’s favorite memory.)AKA A Lullaby for Bucky Barnes. Contents: A severely traumatized brain called Ace, a highly weaponized Arm called Sweetheart, and a cyborg supersoldier in chronic need of naptime. Also, unfortunately, the plot of Captain America: Civil War.





	1. A Thousand Years I’ve Been Out of Frame

**Author's Note:**

> Lonely I, I'm so alone now  
> There'll be no rest for the wicked  
> There's no song for the choir  
> There's **no hope for the weary**  
>  If you let them win without a fight  
> I let my good one down  
> I let my true love die  
> I had his heart but I broke it every time  
>  \- “No Rest for the Wicked” by Lykke Li, 2014

## Prelude: Moonlight Serenade

\- By Glenn MIller, 1939.

 

 _It is a sunsoaked afternoon, and he is tired all the way down to his bones. He can hear the soft_ scritch-scratch-scritch _of Steve’s pencil on paper, and faintly, distantly, someone listening to Glenn Miller._

(This is the Soldier-Asset-Bucky’s favorite memory.)

_The heat of a Brooklyn summer is thick as taffy all around him. The sunlight glows orange through his eyelids. His muscles are like stretched out rubber bands. Worked hard and long but not so sore as to keep him awake._

(That is something the Soldier-Asset-Bucky understands: the gentle warm-weariness of a job well done, hard work recently finished. And god does he know what it is to be tired.)

_He's right on the edge of sleep, toeing the line, drifting. Anything is possible: aliens might invade New York, or Katharine Hepburn might ask him for a light, or Steve might run his fingers through Bucky's hair and lean in and --_

(Well. It's nice to think about, anyway.)

 

 

 

 

 

## 1: The Truth

I've been trying to re-learn my name  
It seems like **a thousand years** **  
I've been out of frame**

\- by Foster the People, 2014.

 

The Asset is hiding in a tree. It is. Not Ideal. But at the moment, he lacks the fucking resources to do more than just stay here. In the goddamn tree.

The Asset -- Bucky? The Asset. He is just so goddamn tired. It is possible that he has been tired since the 1930s, but he lacks the intel to confirm that. No point thinking about it too much at this juncture. Especially since thinking about it too much makes--

_\--it feel like every single muscle in his body is aching, overworked and under-rested. He's lying in his bunk, trying to work up the energy to jerk off, but even that is beyond his reach just now. He hasn't been this tired since… ever. It's not like no one warned him about Boot Camp, but this makes--_

\--something else pop up in his head. He grits his teeth and rides out the waves of nausea inducing pain that roll through his temples.

The thing is, he has no idea of that memory is really his, or really real, or even a memory at all. He had no frame of reference. As far as he knows, Hydra can do pretty much whatever the fuck they want. And to the best of his knowledge, they've been using the space between his ears as their personal sandbox for… a while.

It's… not _completely_ impossible that he's been tired since the 1930s. It just doesn't seem all that realistic.

But in a more immediate sense, he’s tired because he hasn’t slept in at least 24 hours and (he suspects) possibly longer.

He’s also tired because Captain fucking _Asshole_ is a heavy sonuvabitch. Swimming with one arm dislocated and the other made out of goddamn _metal_ was gonna be difficult enough without having to carry Steve’s unconscious ass to shore. On top of that, he has the headache to end all goddamn headaches, _and_ he’s been dodging emergency services all day.

Hence the fucking tree. It’s poking him in the back, and the ass, and half the branches broke on the way up, but the foliage makes good cover. The conflicting reek of blood and smoke and dirty water and now fucking _pinesap_ is making his stomach turn and his head throb more insistently, but it should have any sniffer dogs chasing their own tails.

**OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.**

And yeah, that ain’t exactly helping. It’s very goddamn distracting to have that blaring like a klaxon in the back of his head. He knows he’s felt this imperative before. It’s got the taste of urgency. Of fear. The Soldier was always afraid. Bucky -- the Asset knows that, without really remembering a specific instance.

It’s been just over twenty-four hours since Maintenance, but it’s like the **PROTOCOL** knows that he’s got exactly no plans to return to any kind of fucking base. It had been hard enough to hold off the **PARAMETERS.**

He shudders a little and his head gives a particularly nausea-inducing throb, and it's--

_\--just one more blow, perhaps two, and then the mission will be over, and he can go back in the tank. He wants to crawl back and beg for it. He wants the oblivion. The fear will stop. The screaming will go away. But then the stupid target opens his stupid mouth again and says--_

_“Then finish it. Cause I’m with you till… the end of the line.”_

_And it isn’t_ **_TARGET: CAPTAIN AMERICA_ ** _staring up at him. There’s no helmet, no white letter A over fierce blue eyes and a jaw like a slab of all-American beef, it’s--_

 _\--Just a skinny kid, and he’s got his hand on Stevie’s shoulder, and the words are coming out of_ his _mouth._ “--end of the line, pal," _is on his lips, in his throat. Stevie doesn’t have a black eye (for once) but he’s more bruised, more beaten than Bucky’s ever seen him and it's breaking his heart, it's--_

_\--Steve._

_Wait._

_Bucky?_

_Who the hell--_

**_MISSION PARAMETERS: TERMINATE CAPTAIN AMERICA._ **

_This isn’t Captain America, this is Steve --_ **_STEVEN GRANT ROGERS, CAPTAIN AMERICA_ ** _\-- it’s Stevie, little Stevie, the fuckin’ skinny punk-ass kid who can’t keep his goddamn mouth shut it’s--_

_The Helicarrier shifts. The ground falls away. The Arm saves him -- he feels the wrench of it all along his shoulders, down his spine, along his sides where the arm is braced, attached. He ignores the pain. He watches. He watches Captain America falling, falling, falling..._

**_OBJECTIVE ACHIEVED: CONFIRM TERMINATION._ **

_No. This can’t be happening, it's--_

\--going to make him sick if it doesn't stop, Jesus. The Asset shakes his head hard, bangs it back against the tree trunk harder. Which does nothing to help his headache but does annoy the shit out of the squirrel who’s tree he’s sharing.

 _Thanks for the flashback, there, Ace,_  the Asset thinks, hard and angry, at his own goddamn brain. _I do actually fuckin’ remember what happened earlier to-goddamn-day._

Though, to be fair to his brain, that’s hardly a given.

He’s glad he shook off the flashback before it got to the part where Steve had actually been goddamn dead, for all of about thirty seconds. He hadn’t been breathing, when they reached the shore. The Asset had heard that big dumb heart stop. It had been enough to satisfy the **MISSION PARAMETERS**. Termination con-fucking-firmed.

The horror that had filled him at the time had been so all-consuming that he could do nothing but stare. _He's dead. I killed him._ He'd killed so many people, why had this one felt like cracking open his own ribcage, flaying out his insides for all the world to see?

And then whatever juice had made Stevie into Captain America did its job and that big dumb heart gave a weak stutter in his chest. He turned his head, coughed slightly, spitting dirty river water. His chest rose and fell. The Asset listened to the heartbeat, getting stronger.

Then he had bolted -- or, stumbled, at any rate -- away before the **MISSION PARAMETERS** could come back.

He’s still waiting, terrified that at any moment the **MISSION PARAMETERS** will sink teeth into his neck and drag him back into line. But the only thing in his head besides pain is --

**OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.**

He grunts, and bangs his head back against the tree. Again. The squirrel chitters its rage at him.

He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to think around the protocol. But he keeps picturing it: staring down at Steve (Little Stevie, when in his goddamn life had that idiot said “I’m not gonna fight you” to anyone?) and hearing nothing. No rattling breath. No wheezy cough. No heartbeat. Nothing, for thirty whole seconds. He had actually _killed_ the guy, even if it didn’t take. He remembers--

No. _Fuck._ Stay in the present. _Come on._

Steve had started breathing again. And the the **MISSION PARAMETERS** haven’t come back. (Yet.)

But.

If thirty seconds had been enough to silence the **MISSION PARAMETERS,** then maybe there’s a way to fool the **OPERATION PROTOCOL** too.

He rubs his face with both hands. Far away, he can hear emergency services, sirens and orders being shouted.

**OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.**

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the Asset mutters under his breath. “I got it, alright? I fuckin’ got it. You want me to return to base? I’ll return to fuckin’ base.”

 

* * *

 

He kicks down the back door of the bank, knife in one hand, grenade in the other, and a snarl on his lips. It's after dark, and when he tears into the vault, there's just two people there: techs.  One has a bow tie. The other has a beard. They were there-- they were there when--

“Spu--!”

A roundhouse kick to the temple cures Bow Tie of the urge to shout code phrases. Before Beardy Face can make the same attempt, the Asset holds up the grenade demonstrably. “I go to sleep, we both go boom,” he grates out.

Beardy Face raises his hands.

“Smart choice, dollface,” the Asset says. Beardy Face goes improbably paler.

“Oh my God,” he says. “You really are--”

“Ah ah ah,” the Asset says, raising his knife and jiggling it. Beardy Face's eyes fix on the knife and follow as it weaves a little in the air. “What did I just say?” Beardy Face shuts his mouth.  “Good boy. Now come here.”

Beardy Face swallows, then shuffles closer.

“Closer,” the Asset whispers.

Beardy Face looks about ready to wet himself, but obligingly shuffles within reach.

“Sleep tight, Asshole,” the Asset tells him, and then lays him out with a swift knock to the temple.

For a moment, he stares down at them. They're here, they're helpless. And they--

_\--are talking all around him. “He's been out of cryofreeze too long,” the man with the bow tie is saying._

_The Asset stares into space, not making eye contact with any of the techs or the STRIKE team. That much is compliance, even if nothing else is. There is a moment replaying in his mind._

_The man on the bridge, the Target, saying -- something. A name, a blank space, a mute void where a name should be. And the look on his face, recognition, but (for once) not fear. Hope, instead, and all the pain that comes with it._

_And the Asset had been on a bridge. A different bridge. A bridge with a train. Before he had been the Asset. The Target had been there, too. Back when he had been… who, exactly?_

_The man on the bridge. The Asset. The Target. Who was he? He used to know this. He used to know--_

_“Then wipe him. Start over,” says the Handler._

_And the body knows what comes next. Hands push him back into the Chair. The bite guard. Taste of rubber on his tongue, squeaking between his teeth as he bites down hard. The machinery starting up all around him. He must stay still. The restraints. His chest heaves, his heart races. He must stay still -- and then -- and then they--_

\--deserve to die.

These techs. They were there. How many times? How many wipes?

He could do it. Lord knows he's got the skillset. They made sure of that, didn't they? Burned out every part of him that wasn't weaponizable.

He could kill them. They deserve to die.

The Arm is up, and he doesn't remember raising it. It's ready to fall, to crush their skulls and leave them bleeding and--

 _No,_ says something inside. Not the **PARAMETERS** , something else. Him. That's him giving the orders now. Something inside giving directives. As much as he wants them all dead, he doesn’t want to actually do it himself. He doesn't want more blood on his hands.

He turns, from them to the Chair. The computer banks.

He tears the place apart.

He puts his metal fist through the glass screens. He tears wires out and like so many loose threads. He cracks the metal casings and breaks the motherboards into powder. He whirls on the Chair.

The Chair--

For a split second he balks at the smell of it: metal and electricity. Burned hair and piss. For a second, he is frozen.

Then he surges forward, savage. He rips the cables out of the wall, tears the arms off and twists them. Digs his fingers into the restraints and bends them open. It's just metal and leather, rubber and wires. It's nothing supernatural, just a machine. Machines can be broken. He pulls it all apart and when there's nothing left to rend, he batters with his metal arm over--

_The procedure has already started._

And over--

_Put him on ice._

And over--

_Wipe him._

And then. Then he turns on the crumpled techs, Arm raised, ready once more. His blood is up, primed to fight, full of fury. This time, maybe--

But suddenly, he is just

so

tired.

The anger drains away.

 _Enough,_ he thinks. _It's enough._

He lets the Arm fall to his side. It purrs out a calibration loop; shoulder to fingertip to shoulder.

 

He locks the two scientists in the closet and goes rummaging through their files. Everything on him is hardcopy only: too sensitive to risk some industrious hacker getting their hands on it. He figures he has an hour until Hydra comes to check on this outpost. That's standard procedure, and they're going to have more important things to stress about just now.

This means he has an hour to get the trackers out of his goddamn Arm.

He finds the relevant files -- a dog eared, often photocopied _user manual,_ Jesus Christ. He turns it over in his hands -- metal and flesh. He drags his metal thumb across the dirty, dog eared edges. He scratches his fingernail along the plastic spiral binding.

He keeps thinking it should be red leather. Black star. Hand written. Cyrillic. He keeps thinking... this isn't the right book.

He shakes his head. It's the book he's fucking got, so he starts flipping through. He needs intel.

And yes, there _are_ trackers in the Arm, and a timed sedative, a remotely activated adrenaline shot, and an _explosive_ because holy shit why the fuck not, he guesses?  Not to mention the Sputnik off-button, which is hardwired in. Thank God they never sent him to a science museum or an astronomy class, Christ. But even there, deactivating that will be a simple matter of cutting a wire. He’s not going to have to do any self-surgery, it seems, because “any foreign object placed beneath the skin without extensive anchoring will be rejected by the body.”

His side and shoulder aches, where the Arm has been… _extensively anchored._ He rolls his shoulder and hopes to god there aren’t any memories of that surgery lurking under the sick roiling turmoil of his long-forgotten past.

His head hurts in a way that feels like storm clouds on the horizon.

He rubs at his temple. Still. That does explain a few things. The manual says his body can get over just about anything within three days. Well. Anything short of amputation, he guesses.

He looks down at the Arm. “Alright Sweetheart,” he says to it. “We got shit to do.”

 

It takes forty-five minutes to get all the trackers, as well as the explosive, the sedative, and the adrenaline, which are all buried deep in the shoulder socket. He cuts the wire for the Sputnik off switch and pulls out the tiny receiver it was attached to. He puts the trackers in his pocket, then locks the sedative, the adrenaline, and the explosive in one of the safety deposit boxes.

He raids the equipment storage box behind the Tank for civvie clothes, a good backpack, some rations, and a canteen of water. He leaves the tac gear behind. He takes his user manual, rolled up deep in the bottom of his backpack. He takes no weapons.

Fifty minutes.

He spends sixty seconds of his remaining ten minutes staring longingly at the Tank.

He is very goddamn tired and he would very much like to sleep.

He turns his back on the Tank and flees the scene of destruction. The Hydra scientists are awake now, banging feebly on the closet door. He doesn’t let them out, but as he’s leaving, an armored car comes around the corner a little too fast. He turns, and pulls a baseball cap on, tucks his gloved hands into his pockets, and keeps walking.

 

* * *

 

First, he goes to Union Station. He slips one tracker into the duffel bag of a kid heading out to Atlanta on a greyhound bus. He slips another into the briefcase of a man heading to the airport and, eventually, Tokyo. He slips a third into the pocket of a woman going home to California, and the last into a suitcase belonging to an African dignitary of some kind.

He could have just destroyed the trackers, but this feels more satisfying. He imagines Hydra scrambling to recover their precious Asset, wasting resources sending teams to every corner of the goddamn globe. Because--

 _\--Steve may have been the Man With a Plan_ _but James Buchanan Barnes_ _was no slouch, especially when it came to pranks. Once, when a CO had nearly gotten Stevie_ _and a whole platoon killed, Bucky and the Howlies_ _had 1) taken the officer’s desk out to his parking space, 2) taken his Jeep completely apart, and then 3) assembled said Jeep in the office, where his desk had been. That bastard spent a week trying to figure out how they'd gotten the Jeep in through the door. No one felt much inclined to help him, because--_

\--that's tactically sound.

Fuck. Ow. The Asset rubs his temples. He might have smiled at that memory, but remembering it felt like twirling a fork in his brain stem.

And he can't afford to be out of commission right now. He needs a plan. He needs to fucking think, but his head aches. The pain is building, reminds him of being in the Chair all over again, but this time the pain is coming from the inside, and he--

  
  
  


\--is standing in a bare apartment. He's staring at a place where the wall has been ripped out, revealing the wiring and support beams behind the drywall. There's a single hammer discarded on the floor. A can of beer. All of it covered in dust. Clearly someone was partway through renovations this and gave up for some reason. But he can hear water gurgling somewhere, so the place hasn’t been cut off or anything.

A good place to lie low for a while.

But how the ever living _fuck_ did he get here?

He has a vague, uncertain memory of ducking his head, moving fast but not too fast, finding the seediest part of town (not far from the train yard) and systematically scanning the buildings for a good place to squat that wasn't already occupied.

He was trained for this. To hide in plain sight, lie low and wait for extraction. There won’t be an extraction this time, but this skillset -- assess, adapt, improvise-- this is something he's been good at for a long--

_\--while to find the best spot, with clear sightlines down onto the town and now Steve's gone and fucked that sweet spot but royally. A salute. Jesus. What the hell was he thinking? He's going to kick Steve's ass for this, never mind that he's the captain, because he's an idiot and has been for a long-ass--_

\--time.

Christ.

The Asset clutches his head and breathes through the pain. He is built to endure, but this is. This is a lot.

Fuck it. He's here now. And if he wasn't really -- present -- for the finding of this space, doesn't change the fact that it's a good squat and he needs a place to call base for now.

He will lie low for a few days. This is an order that he gives to himself. _Mission Objective,_ he thinks. _Lie low for a few days._ There’s a kind of satisfaction in giving himself orders. It’s like a job well done, but with less blood.

He sits on the bare floor of his squat. It is a partially-renovated apartment. There is water in the taps. There is glass in the windows, on the other side of the shades. There is no electricity, but he does not require electricity. Yeah, his head hurts, but he can handle it. He grabs his backpack, pulls out a ration pack. He munches on a field ration and feels pretty darn good about himself.

 

* * *

 

Twenty-four hours later, the Asset is kind of wishing that he’d just crawled back in the Tank, or maybe just turned the gun on himself. The persistent headache has blossomed into a supernova of agony. He’s remembering things, but it’s too much too much too much. He's got twenty-seven years of memory crowding into a brain that not used to having more than seventy-two hours. And anyway--

_\--Steve's not going anywhere when he can't move without puking. He says it's just a headache, a real bad one. A migraine, his ma called ‘em. He gets ‘em sometimes when the weather is changing, just needs to call in sick and wait it out. Given that Steve didn't call in sick when he had fucking pneumonia, Buck can't quite imagine what the pain must be like. But it ain’t like he can get himself into trouble if he can't move, so Bucky can safely leave him here, right?_

_It's just that he doesn't want to._

_“Ahhh,” he says, “I can take a day, not like the professor knows when I'm there, and anyway--”_

\--it's a little hard to process the sudden influx of memories when your body is trying to turn itself inside out.

Distantly, the Asset realizes that, because the Americans never had access to Karpov and Lukin’s book, they had never really been able to use his brainwashing as it was intended to be used.

Instead, they'd used drugs.

Drugs to keep him obedient, to keep him focused, to keep him awake and not distracted by things like hunger. _“Parts of the brain are just completely dark, but the amygdala, parts of the hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens, they’re all working overtime.” “What are you telling me, doctor?” “I’m telling you that you need to add some serious anti-anxiety meds to his cocktail.”_ They used chemicals to cut off some parts of his brain and wake up other parts. And now, all the chemicals his body has relied on for the last decade are gone.

Distantly, a part of him understands this. The main part of him, however, is rather absorbed in the business of shaking violently, sweating aggressively, losing fluids from every orifice, and feeling like--

_\--shit. And Christ, what a place to feel like shit. He's in the corner of their cage, and he must have kept the whole block awake with his coughing. He reeks, the cage reeks, his fellow prisoners reek, and he can’t stop fucking shivering. It’s like the cold is inside him, coming out from his bones to meet the cold digging into his skin. He can’t get warm. He can’t get comfortable. Dugan is watching him with worry on his big stupid face. Worry and pity and fear and Christ, this must be what it's like for Steve when he feels like--_

\--absolute death.

Christ. That was a bad one. The memory makes him feel sick, on top of the sick he already feels. Fuck.

He locks himself in the bathroom and doesn't bother wasting rations by eating. He scratches at the bugs crawling on his skin (he knows they aren't really there but that Does Not Help) and grits his teeth to keep from screaming (and knows that he has lots of practice with that, which also Does Not Help.) The Arm does calibration loops so fast and so constantly that the plates seem to never stop rippling, up and down and--

_\--up and down, over and over, the soothing, repetitive motion something to focus on that isn’t pain, isn’t the halo coming down. The loop starts again as the paddles press and instead of the fear, he thinks about the up and down and--_

“Thanks for trying, Sweetheart,” he tells it.

 

* * *

 

 _Scritch, scratch, scritch,_ he remembers. Glenn Miller. _Moonlight Serenade,_ he remembers. And being _warm._ Warm all the way through.

Just the memory is enough to get him through the worst of it.

 

* * *

 

It has been a whole week since his last wipe. One hundred and sixty eight hours of freedom, oh yeah. And yes, he has spent most of that time in pain; either puking his guts up or shitting his brains out because, wow. Detox sucks the big one. And yes, he has spent most of that time in an unfurnished, half-renovated apartment with no electricity. And yes, he has spent all but the last twelve hours or so with the kind of headache that feels like tiny gremlins trying to burrow out of his brain with pickaxes and dynamite. So, in his experience, freedom also sucks the big one. But hey. Freedom may be a real turd sandwich, but it’s _his_ goddamn turd sandwich.

Right now, he’s lying spread eagled on the floor, trying to organize his thoughts.

It is…

Hard.

He remembers, with more or less equal clarity: wearing a suit and dancing with a woman in a blue dress that swirled around her calves; dragging a knife across a Nazi’s throat; using a high-tech rocket launcher to bring down a stealth jet that would have been invisible to the naked eye, like something out of a goddamn Wonder Woman comic. He remembers targets in suits with padded shoulders, in three-piece tailoring with high waists and suspenders, in skinny jeans, in fatigues. He remembers a man with Captain America’s head sitting on skinny shoulders; a stubborn set to his jaw and blond hair flopping across his forehead. He has a lot of memories of a city full of old cars, women with their hair curled, going to school, but without any phones or computers or calculators.

It is. Confusing.

But he can _think_ now, in a way he couldn’t before. He can allow himself to think about things.

He knows that Hydra can take away memories, because he can remember them doing that, now. (There are still blank spaces in his recollections, but they feel different -- trying to think about them feels like looking at the sun directly, while some instinctive part of your brain hisses _don’t_.)

He knows that Hydra can take away memories, but he has to wonder if they can do the opposite, because none of this makes any fucking sense unless the memories are implanted. And if Captain (Stevie) America recognized him…

Captain America’s voice and appearance was enough to rattle his programming, enough to make him slither out of Hydra, slither past the protocols and crawl free. To the Asset’s knowledge, the only people who have that kind of power are Handlers.

The thought makes him break out in a cold sweat. Wanting and Not Wanting things still makes him feel a little queasy, but… He doesn’t want any more goddamn Handlers.

He needs more intel on this man. Rogers. Stevie. Captain America. Whoever the fuck he is.

 

That is what brings him to the exhibit.

 

His mission briefing on Rogers included intelligence on strengths (speed, agility, the shield), weaknesses (aim for the legs), but had failed to mention that he was born in nineteen-goddamn-eighteen, and had spent most of the last century frozen like a popsicle. Jesus Christ, the Asset was working with morons.

At first, when he sees a man called James Buchanan Barnes wearing his face, he figures there are three possibilities. Most probably, he is an assassin who has been made to look like Bucky Barnes for the express purpose of throwing Captain America off his game. Slightly less probable is that he is actually a clone, programmed and enhanced by Hydra -- he’d never heard of them cloning someone successfully, but if Barnes was captured, they could hypothetically have his genetic material on file or whatever.

By far the _least probable_ explanation is that James Buchanan Barnes, born 1917, fell into a frozen ravine seventy goddamn years ago and somehow fucking survived.

And yet. He’s remembers things. He remembers an alley. Many alleys. He remembers the skinny version of Rogers. He remembers, something, maybe--

_“--she’s got a friend,” Steve says like the little fucking shit he is, and claps him on the shoulder before turning back to the bar. Bucky turns too, and sinks onto the stool, reaches for his drink. He’s not any more drunk than he was when he started._

_He doesn’t like to think about that. Doesn’t like to think about the way everything feels different now, the way he’s hungry_ all the goddamn time, _the way he could_ smell _Carter coming before he saw her. The way everything feels like it’s hanging on his last nerve, like he’s about to fucking snap at any goddamn minute._

“--Oh dig my grave both wide and deep, wide and deep!” _the guys are singing._

_Steve is watching him. And Bucky realizes that he should have said something to that remark. Steve was being a little shit, and Bucky Before The War would have had something to say about that._

_Far too late, he says: “You’re an asshole, Steven Grant.”_

“Put tombstones at my head and feet, head and feet!”

_“You okay, Buck?” Steve asks, all concerned and shit._

_“Who me?” Bucky says, all innocence._

“And on my breast just carve a turtle dove!”

_Steve isn’t buying what Bucky’s selling here, Bucky can tell._

“To signify I died of love!”

_Bucky finishes his drink. “Just tired pal. You think maybe--”_

\--no. Not maybe. Definitely. _Quit dancing around it, Barnes._

Christ.

He rubs his face with his flesh hand. He is just so fucking tired. The -- Bucky. He's has been tired as hell since nineteen-goddamn-thirty, when he saw three big kids ganging up on some scrawny idiot who wouldn’t stay the fuck down, and he thought: ‘Aw hell. I should probably kick their asses.’

None of that is in the exhibit, but he knows it’s true. And in the end, that’s what convinces him. It's doesn't make sense, but it's true. It's not realistic, but...

_James Buchanan Barnes, this is your life. Realistic went out the fucking window the day you met Steven Grant Rogers._

 

 

 

 

 


	2. I Don’t Have to Fucking Explain

##  [2: Brooklyn Baby](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enZIgSW5JOE)

You never liked the way I said it  
If you don't get it, then forget it  
So **I don't have to fucking explain** it  
\- by Lana Del Rey, 2014

 

The Asset-Bucky person-thing is now as confident as he can be (under the seriously fucked up circumstances) that these memories are 1) real, bona fide J B Barnes Made Memories, and 2) he is, in fact, the Original J B Barnes.

Tentative conclusion: these memories are his. Furthermore: he would like to keep them, thank you very goddamn much. No more drugs. No more Chair. No more fucking Hydra. Recollections flit like butterflies through his half-cooked brain. He wants to be able to pin them down, keep them. He doesn’t want to forget again.

_OK Ace, if you're so worried about forgetting, why doncha write it down?_

On his way out of the exhibit, he stops by the gift shop. He buys a journal. His hand skips over the one with the shield on it and opts instead for one with a picture of swirling stars and nebulae smeared across the cover. He also picks up a set of five ballpoint pens with cloisonne cherry blossoms on the barrels. They are full of colors; the ethereal blue and black of the space-themed notebook and the gaudy gold and jewel-tones on the pens. Hydra would never have given him something like this.

He tucks the pamphlet from the Captain America exhibit in the front of the journal and walks out, turning his head at all the right times, almost automatically avoiding the cameras.

 

* * *

 

Getting onto a freight train heading for New York is child’s play for the Fist of Hydra. He raided an old Hydra depot in Baltimore and restocked his backpack with rations and water. There’s an old **OPERATION PROTOCOL** that keeps him munching down rations even when they taste like chalky misery. **THE BODY REQUIRES 1500 CALORIES PER DAY TO MAINTAIN FUNCTIONALITY.** They’d always given him some kind of horrible shit-smoothie after he came out of the ice, and then again before he went in. The Americans had used a tube, but the Russians let him drink it with a straw while he read files. The Americans had developed a screen-based system that got compressed information into his eidetic memory, but it always gave him a headache like a motherfucker.

He... prefers paper. Admitting a preference doesn't even set off another wave of nausea inducing migraines.

_Nice. Great work, Ace._

In the shadowy back of the cold freight car, stinking of rust and rot in a way that feels strangely homelike to him, he opens the pristine starry notebook. He shifts, wedging himself more firmly between a crate and the side of the car. There’s light coming through a hole somewhere, not enough for a normal person to see by but he is hardly normal. He takes one of the pens in his flesh hand, puts the nib to the paper and writes:

_James Buchanan Barnes, Sergeant. 32557038. Born 10 March 1917. Died 19 February 1945_

He pauses. He writes a question mark after 1945. Makes it an uncertainty. But it doesn’t _feel_ like an uncertainty. Whoever it was that used to run around Brooklyn with 95 pounds of unadulterated trouble, it wasn’t _him_. The memories don't belong to him, he’s just… the caretaker. Looking after them, making sure they don’t go anywhere. They’re the Sergeant’s.  That guy died; 19 February 1945…?

He shakes his head, moves on. Under that, he writes:

 _Steven Grant Rogers, Captain. 987654320,_ he writes, and something about that irritates him. He pauses. Thinks about it. It's...  Because that ain't even a proper serial number, because there were no real papers on him, no next of kin listed, so if the serum went wrong--

The pen creaks alarmingly in Bucky's suddenly clenched first. He shakes it loose and keeps writing. _Born 4 July--------_

His pen slips, and the words _fucking fourth of july swear to christ goddamn ridiculous_ want to come off the nib. He does not let them. That is not-- compliance--

Jesus fucking Christ.

He’d been about to write _Born 4 July 1918_ with no fucking death date. Compliance would be tracking down Captain America and putting a bullet in his damn brain stem. The old **MISSION PARAMETERS** give a twitch, like something long dead turning over in its grave. Like him.

He swallows thick, acidic fear. He’d meant to start writing down the memories, but now an irrational terror fills him: that he’ll fucking relapse, or whatever, and won’t wake up again until he’s looking down at Stevie’s battered body, no breath, no pulse, and he can’t--

He can’t----

He tears the page out and he would set it on fire if he had matches, but he doesn’t, so he just fucking eats it instead, trusting his body to dispose of the evidence.

He frowns at the notebook, contemplates the blank page. He doesn’t trust himself to think too much about Captain America, for Stevie’s sake. But.

He remembers bits and snatches of his programming. It happened after the Arm (a soothing purr settles the plates on his arm) and before **MISSION PARAMETERS** started shrieking orders like an overenthusiastic drill sergeant. Programming was repetitive. Boring as fuck.

But he remembers how it’s done, so hey. DIY reprogramming. He can do this.

He puts pen to paper. _Do not comply_ , he writes, an order to himself. He writes it over and over and over, in every language he knows, and he folds down the corner.

 

* * *

 

He keeps a tight lid on the memories when he gets to New York. It is A Trial and a fucking half to do that. New York is like looking at a target who’s in disguise, that sneaky slithery feeling he gets when someone is trying to trick his eyes into looking past them, but can’t because he’s _him._  He keeps whipping his head around fast to double take at things. Combined with the backpack, this makes him look like a tourist, which ought to be fine, but irritates and offends the hell out of him.

Half the time he’s double taking at things that ain't there anymore; a billboard, or a tenement, or a grocer’s that Isn’t. The old James Buchanan Barnes had known this place the way the Asset knows the specs on his Arm. The way a normal person might know their mother’s face or their lover’s skin or their children’s laughs. That old knowledge sits under the new Bucky’s skin like a rash. It comes up worse if he scratches it, but it drives him nuts if he doesn’t.

And then, he remembers something, from Hydra. He remembers. Going off-mission. Sitting in an abandoned apartment full of echoes and then Karpov and Zelenko finding him there. _Sputnik,_ and back in the tank.

He latches onto that, lets his feet carry him, to the subway, down the streets, through alleys.

But, when he gets there, the apartment is gone. The _building_ is gone. He’s sure it was here, sure that there was a little tenement building, woulda been a perfect squat, but there’s nothing like that here, just...

A God Damn Starbucks.

“What the fuck?” he says, and jumps.

His own voice sounds strange to him; gravelly and rough-edged and… Well that’s what happens when you don’t talk for a week and a half, he supposes.

There's a man walking past. He has his hair shaved on the sides, but it's long on top, and tied into a little knot. Bucky can’t quite stop staring at the Bun. “Hey,” he says to the guy. “What happened to the building?” 

Something in Bucky’s tone makes the man look up, look right at him, which makes Bucky’s skin crawl. He doesn’t want to be _seen,_ but--

Man Bun looks from Bucky to the building, then back to Bucky. “What?” he says, flat and unfriendly.

Bucky waves a gloved hand at the building and scowls. “Used to be apartments. What the fuck happened?”

The man rolls his eyes. “How the fuck should I know? Google it if you’re so desperate.” He walks away.

Bucky looks back up at the building, at the God Damn Starbucks, and narrows his eyes. He is desperate. Google could a very useful source of intel.

But he needs a laptop for that. And a place to keep the laptop.

 

* * *

 

There’s office space above the God Damn Starbucks -- for let, according to the sign in the window. Bucky breaks in. Child’s play, and it soothes a part of his brain that always wants to know where, _exactly,_ Base is. He acquires a sleeping bag, and scopes out places where he can take a shower. He uses cash to _buy_ a refurbished laptop and a phone with a data plan, because people are sometimes super irritating about tracking down their stolen electronics and also… he doesn’t do that anymore.

He props the new-old laptop on his knees. He Googles things.

The old building -- the one he knew, the one that had been Base, had been his _home_ \-- was condemned and demolished, and then rebuilt, in the eighties. He figures he musta been there sometime in the seventies (and… for about five years in the thirties and forties.) Frankly it was a miracle the old rat trap he remembered had made it as far as the fifties.

He still feels strangely bereft by the loss. He tries not to think about why, tries not to let the memories sweep over him but how--

“--long would it take me,” _Bucky croons, low, to the dishes, because the song is still in his head. He’s swaying a bit as he scrubs, the music in his bones, in his ribs._ “To be near if you beckon?” _He’s got a real nice view of the brick wall from this window, and just a sliver of street, but at least there’s a breeze stirring the stifling summer air. That’s something._ “Off hand I would figure / less than a second.”

_“Bucky,” Steve says, pleadingly, from the other room. “Bing Crosby you ain’t.”_

_Bucky takes a deep breath and prepares to belt out the next line even louder. “_ Do you think I’ll remember / How _\--”_

\--is he supposed to stop this shit from happening? Jesus.

He's got so little control over when the memories come up, and he never knows if the next one is going to set off the  **PARAMETERS.** At least memories of Skinny Punkass Steve don't seem to trigger any desire to kill Captain America -- he shudders at the thought. 

He Googles _make memories go away._  There are articles. With advice, and steps, and resources...

They say that avoidance, if it’s an option, is perfectly fine. Stay away from the people and places that trigger your memories. Give yourself time to heal.

Sure, that sounds okay, but Bucky’s pretty sure there ain’t a corner of the globe he’s never been sent to. He’s pretty sure he’s killed people on six outta the seven continents, and he doesn’t think that they have any God Damn Starbucks in Antarctica, so that’s out.

So maybe Brooklyn triggers a lot of memories, but 99 out of a 100 don’t involve any murder. Bucky doesn’t like his odds for other parts of the world. Also, 100 out of 100 memories only involve Skinny Punkass Steve. He has no memories at all of Captain America of the Charles Atlas shoulders strolling down Flatbush Avenue. And he won’t, he knows. So. At least in Brooklyn he’s safe from all that.

Google says that thinking about the memory until it loses its power is another option, but the trouble there is the sheer _mass_ of memory that he’s working with. He gets the feeling that most people using these techniques have got one, maybe two or three memories that they’re trying to avoid. He wants to avoid _all of them._ Just in case. He won’t risk the **PARAMETERS** sneaking up on him again.

One of the articles suggests he try _memory alteration_ which _no fucking thanks, pal._

Learn mindfulness! Be in the present! The internet tells him. Be positive! Focus on happy memories! Which, _fuck you very much, Google, I don’t want the happy memories either._

Talk to somebody! Join a support group! _Yeah, I think a support group might just notice my metal fucking arm._

And then he realizes he’s got eighteen tabs open on intrusive memories, where they come from, and how to manage them. It’s been four hours since he started and he is _starving._ He closes the laptop and goes out to find some food.

 

* * *

 

He stays in Brooklyn.

He wears glasses with no prescription, gives a false name, ties his hair back in a fair imitation of Man Bun, and smiles the James Buchanan Smile (He practiced it in a mirror. His face already knew how to do it.) When he ties his hair back, puts on the glasses, and smiles the James Buchanan Smile, he looks nothing like the dead-eyed husk-person who is the subject of a worldwide manhunt. Also, New Yorkers never see nothing.

Some things don’t change.

Other things do.

Brooklyn is nothing like he -- nothing like the memories. There are lots of weird cafes, and people wearing their suspenders all wrong, and lots of guys with terrible beards and their hair in buns. Bucky blends right the fuck in, except for his accent, which is more Brooklyn than even Brooklyn can handle, apparently.

Still. He goes to the God Damn Starbucks. It has food, sort of. And it has decent wifi. He’s basically moved into the God Damn Starbucks. He discovers that he likes cake pops. He likes cake pops a lot.

He also listens in on the lives of people around him. A coffee shop, he learns, is an excellent place to learn how to be a human again, if you’re observant, and have more than half a brain. One can learn, not only how to smile and fit into the narrow tracks of “normal human behavior” but also _exactly_ how far you can push those boundaries before someone either gets in your face about it, or calls the manager to bawl you out. He learns that if you have dark skin, you avoid men in uniform, and say “ma’am” or “sir” to service people. If you do not have dark skin, you can get away with more, as long as you don’t look homeless. Bucky looks a little homeless. Also, saying “ma’am” and “sir” is as deeply ingrained in him as the fact that this should be a shitty little tenement down the street from an auto garage, and not a God Damn Starbucks.

 

Bucky spends a lot of time Googling. The internet is a deep dark vortex of both knowledge and lies. The internet does not judge him for asking dumb questions like _who is the president_ and _why does everything taste like chemicals._

The internet also provides him with very helpful support groups for people -- not quite like him, but not _not_ like him. People with brains that are wired for something other than Normal Human Behavior.

He learns the word ‘hypervigilance.’ Learns what a flashback is. Learns about dissociation and even his most rudimentary research into trauma recovery tells him that isolating himself is a capital-B Bad Idea.

So he branches out from the God Damn Starbucks. Discovers Junior’s Cheesecake and (rediscovers?) Kossar’s Bialys. Discovers he can speak some Yiddish, and listening to folks kibbitzing in the park about whatever bullshit normal people have to argue about is weirdly soothing to him. The constant noise of the city is weirdly soothing to him. It’s steady, like listening to white noise. Like listening to someone else breathing in the same bed.

 

But the God Damn Starbucks (and the office where he’s squatting) is still Base.

There’s a girl -- or, rather, a person presenting as female? He doesn’t know the terminology. He’ll call her a girl. She calls herself Alex. She comes in with her flat chested, narrow hipped body dressed in plaid skirts and short tops that show off her toned middle. Her bottom lip is more piercing than lip. He likes her face. He likes the way she walks. She is _making_ herself in spite of society and what society tells her she should be. He admires that.

She’s a student, and they start sharing a table, because if they’re sitting with each other, no one asks to sit with them, and neither of them want to sit with people who might try to talk to them. She’s doing med school something, and he -- he tells her he’s writing about World War II, one day when she sees over his shoulder. Sees a picture of James Buchanan Barnes, and looks at him. And he can actually _see_ her not seeing the similarity.

Me too, lady, he thinks.

He looks nothing like James Buchanan Barnes anymore, that boy in the blurry black and white, with his smirk and his hat at a cocky angle, looking like he thinks he’s invincible.

Haaaaaaaaaa, says a voice in the back of his brain. It’s funny. It is. Invincibility doesn’t smirk, doesn’t look like that. He knows, because he sees it in the mirror every day.

 

The internet keeps telling him that he needs a support system, but the idea of meeting people face to  face and just. _Telling them things…_  it gives him the screaming meemies.

So instead of connecting with people face to face, he becomes active on the forums, anonymously, through his secure servers. It’s a compromise. Also: So much more comfortable to interact with pixels and digitized words.

It’s just like having a pen pal, he thinks. Except that he has about half a dozen of them, and they’re all in different time zones, and he can talk to them all constantly, instantly, and at the same time.

There’s a 25 year old girl in Japan called Sachiko who survived a suicide attempt and now counsels others who are struggling with the same problems. She tells him that his Japanese slang terms are about twenty years out of date. There’s a young man calling himself Jonah who was a child soldier in Sierra Leone — he lives in the US now, but he’s grateful to have a ‘friend’ who speaks his language -- all his languages: English, Krio, and Recovering Brainwashed Soldier. There's a surprisingly computer savvy WWII vet called George who thinks that Bucky is also a surprisingly computer savvy nonagenarian. Which, he technically is. There are more, too, but they come and go, an ever-shifting support net, unseen, and never too close, but always there.

These are friends, he thinks. He can't really show his face outside too much, and tries not to draw too much attention to himself, but even so. He has friends. And even when he inevitably has to abandon this base and find a new one, these are friends who can come with him.

They share stories (Bucky's are highly censored but they get the gist) and coping mechanisms and advice. He finds himself in the terrifying position of being there (on an instant messaging platform, at least) for Sachiko when she is in crisis at 3am and didn't want to bother her IRL support group. He did fine, she tells him later. He's a good listener, apparently. He wonders where he learned to do that.

 

In the real world, he watches Alex and the other young people doing strange things with money. There are those who throw plastic around like it has no consequences, but there are also those who pay with cash, furtively, like the expense will slip under the radar if they use the green stuff.

There are people, some of them kids, younger than him (ha!), working two, three, four jobs, and online sidelines selling on “Etsy” whatever the fuck that is. They’re piecing together what they have with whatever they can, to make it into more. They come to the God Damn Starbucks to steal wifi. They laugh about things that make no goddamn sense. There’s a strange beauty in them; in their tattoos and their shit fashion and their weird fucking hair. They all seem to share a frantic anxiety. An underlying, constant stress. Even the ones carrying yoga mats and a deliberate air of calm wear it like a fucking shield between them and the rest of the world. Even the ones that swagger and look confident carry that like an umbrella protecting them from some unseen shitstorm.

It kind of makes sense. After all, it wasn’t so long ago that giant space whales dropped through an interdimensional portal over the city, if the internet is to be trusted (not always, but this time, yes.) And yet, they keep going out.

One day, a girl spots her friend across the shop, waves with unnecessary enthusiasm, and says “Friend-o! How’s your suffering?” like that’s how kids greet each other these days.

He nearly pisses himself trying not to laugh. Not that he’s belittling their suffering, but because he has just decided how he’s going to greet everyone from now on, because this is how people should greet each other, in this day and age. A cheery pet name and an enquiry about their personal misery levels.

He feels kinship with these people.

But at the same time.

He's not like them. He isn't.

 

After a few weeks of going to the God Damn Starbucks and hunting through the internet for useful resources, Bucky finds the support forums for people with superpowers. Most of them are full of shit, but some of them…

One in particular catches his eye. The moderator (who has the very sophisticated username Miss Moderator) seems to have a talent for sniffing out those who are full of shit and quietly blocking them. She says she doesn’t have powers herself, but there’s a cheerful thread of people theorizing what her powers actually are, and she allows it to continue. Smart money’s on “human lie detector.”

And then, one day, Bucky finds himself unceremoniously blocked from the forum.

At first he thinks: Okay, whatever, who gives a shit. Clearly she ain’t a human lie detector, because I _do_ have superpowers, thank you very fucking much.

And then he thinks about the last post he interacted with. There’d been a thread about whether to admit this one kid into the group. The kid said he wasn’t _enhanced_ or anything, but he’s been trained by a non-specified organization to an extent that makes him feel like he’s not human anymore. Like he’s too dangerous to be allowed to interact with regular people. Some people had protested, said this was a group specifically for supers, and Bucky had thought of the Red Room, and lost his temper.

_That’s bullshit. The most dangerous women I ever met weren’t enhanced by anything more than training. But they were definitely fucking superpowered. Look at Black Widow. You saying she ain’t super? You ever had her put you in a chokehold? I didn’t fucking think so._

He knows it’s not the swearing that got him banned, but…

He hacks back into the forum and scrolls through, and realizes that there aren’t any posts about the Black Widow. No one even mentions her. And there aren’t any posts alluding to the Red Room, either, even though there are dozens talking about Hydra and SHIELD and other supposedly secret organizations.

The absence is suspicious enough that he tries to do more digging, but--

He finds himself with an extremely virulent computer virus and a warning from Miss Moderator to back the hell off.

In a fit of paranoia, he drops that computer into the Hudson and gets a new one.

 

He keeps going to the God Damn Starbucks. He doesn’t try to hack back into Miss Moderator’s forum for wayward supers, but he keeps in contact with Sachiko and Jonah and George. He sits in the God Damn Starbucks and shares a table with Alex and... and carefully starts researching himself. And Captain America. He convinces the lingering scraps of **MISSION PARAMETERS** that this is intel gathering, he just needs more intel before he does anything. He still can't look too long at a picture of Steve without feeling ill, so he focuses on James Barnes instead.

This is how he discovers that he still has family.

 

* * *

 

Judith Buchanan Gillespie is over 70 years old and isn't ready to move out of the brownstone she and her husband moved into after they got married. Bucky adores her from the moment he sees her (from the top of a rooftop across the street.) She stuck her head out of the window to holler down at a boy who was catcalling. She threatened to call his momma and tell her exactly what he’d just said. Judith Buchanan Gillespie is afraid of nothing, which is something he can barely connect to, but also something that he longs for with every fiber of his being. He can--

_\--smell the smoke and the sound of the train fills the cavernous space, almost drowning out the shouts of all the other men on furlough and their families. But all he can focus on is her. She's so tiny and hideous and perfect, her little face all squished up in protest, her hair so soft under his fingers and she's so small, so fucking small. Her leans in and kisses her baby soft forehead. She smells just like Rebecca and the rest had smelled at that age: clean baby smell and Ma’s laundry._

_“Judith Buchanan,” Jamie says, and he couldn't sound prouder._

_And at that there are only two options: start bawling or start laughing. Basic has pretty much beaten the tears out of him by now, so there's only one choice, really. Only one thing he can--_

\--remember... Ungh. Memories. Thick and cloying, they cling to him like tar. Jesus. Focus. Present day Judith is tiny and hideous and perfect, too, and more importantly, she's here. In the present. In the real world of _now._

Bucky returns to himself with a full-body shudder. Sometimes the memories grip him like that, all over, and he’s staring out of long dead eyes at a past long gone. He lies very still. Because sometimes, when the memory involves Captain Stevie America Rogers, the side effects include the **MISSION PARAMETERS** zombie-walking out of whatever hell-pit his brain has tried to bury them in.

Bucky opens his eyes, puts one back to the scope, and nearly dies of a goddamn heart attack because, as though summoned into the real world by his vivid fucking flashbacks, there is Steven Asshole Rogers, buzzing his goodhearted, troublemaking way into Judith’s apartment. Bucky has to resist the urge to swing down from the roof like Tarzan and save his geriatric niece from Captain America’s pure intentions and infinite capacity to start fights.

“Steve, no,” Bucky whispers, and then can’t help cackling hysterically to himself. Memes. No one will hear his crazy laugh up here. Rooftops are the best.

Captain America, though. He's the worst. Judith lets him in, because she is a nice old lady who does not deserve this.

Bucky carefully monitors himself. He doesn't feel the **MISSION PARAMETERS** rising from their grave, but that doesn't mean they won't. Thankfully, he brought the scope without the gun it attaches to. So. That's something.

Judith hugs Captain America, putting her thin arms up around his big shoulders and something twists hard behind Bucky’s sternum, an ache he can’t identify as connected to any particular physical issue.

Probably nothing then.

Judith is making tea for him now, and he’s fluttering around like a giant blond butterfly, trying to be helpful and mostly getting in the way. Bucky has a hard time getting a good enough angle to lip read, and when they finally settle in with their teacups, Captain America has his broad back to the window, shoulders hunched in, leaning forward with the cup held between his knees. So all Bucky can see is Judith’s wizened face across from him, crinkled up in kindly understanding.

Steve has his head bowed.

 _What did you want to talk to me about?_ she prompts.

Bucky sees Steve’s shoulders heave in a Great American Sigh, and then he must be talking, because every so often he tips his head to one side, as though for emphasis on a certain word, and Judith is nodding, listening.

Steve talks for a _long_ time while Bucky grinds his teeth with the frustration of not being able to hear. He’s dying to know--

 _So why don’t you do it?_ Judith asks, and Bucky thinks _uh oh_ , softly but emphatically. Because anything that _Steve Rogers_ is _hesitant_ about doing is probably pretty fucking awful, since he’s not at all hesitant about jumping from a plane, without a parachute, into enemy territory.

Steve talks again, and Judith is making a face that he recognizes. She looks so much like his… mother.

 _Steve, son, as the kids say today? Fuck that noise. You do whatever you gotta do to bring him home safe, figure out the rest later,_  says Judith, and then she offers Steve a cookie, smiling like the devil all the while.

 _Uh Oh,_  Bucky thinks, now with capital letters.

 _What’re you asking me for anyway?_ Judith says, and listens to whatever the fuck Steve’s reply is. She makes a softly exasperated face, one that he recognizes. It’s the _Steve you dumbass_ face, and he _knows it._

 _Steve,_ she says, all condescending. _You’re the closest thing he has to family. So bring him home._

And Bucky knows _exactly_ what they’re talking about. Or rather, who.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, an alert he set up on his phone tells him that he’s trending on god damn motherfucking twitter.

He’s bleary eyed, hasn’t yet gotten out of the sleeping bag that’s tucked in a shadowy corner of his squat, where he can see all the entrances and exits without being seen, but his phone wouldn’t stop fucking buzzing, and he finds that not only is #wintersoldier and #DCassassin trending, but also fucking #buckybarnes which shit fuck shit shit shit what the hell did Rogers do now?

There’s a video.

He’s used all his data this month, and he’s only got one bar of wifi from the Starbucks downstairs, but eventually the YouTube clip buffers enough to watch.

It’s Steve. Of course it’s god damn motherfucking Steve Jesus Christ what has he done. He’s standing behind a podium, and he’s wearing the stars and stripes again like a moron, and he looks like he’s standing in front of a firing squad.

“I want to thank you all for coming here today,” he says solemnly. The white star gleams out from the middle of his dumb, heroic chest. “I’d like to make a statement, and then I’ll be taking questions, so…” He clears his throat, swallows, looks down at the notes on his podium. “During a raid on a secret Hydra base, paper files not included in the Widow’s data dump, were retrieved. They have revealed more information about the enhanced assassin who participated in the attacks on Insight Day earlier this year.”

“Don’t do it, Rogers,” Bucky whispers to his phone, even though this video is now at least a few hours old. “Don’t you do it.”

“The files reveal that the assailant known as the Winter Soldier is, in fact, an American POW subjected to enhanced interrogation. The full details of the exact techniques used are not being released, for security reasons, but…” Steve leans forward, hands gripping the edges of the shiny, steel podium. “It’s pretty clear from the files that he was brainwashed. I have to warn you, the material that is being released is… deeply disturbing. And the notes are very clear; at the time of the attack, the man known as the Winter Soldier was operating under duress. We’ve consulted with several experts, and so far, all are in agreement that he cannot be held responsible for his actions.” Steve looks up from his cards, jaw clenching and unclenching. “I’d like to make this very clear,” he says, obviously going off-script a bit. “What happened to him, what he’s done… it’s not his fault.”

The words are like an actual knife twisting in his guts. Bucky swallows, and sees Steve do the same, looking back down at his notes.

“This doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous. This is the other thing that must be understood: we don’t know at the moment whether he’s escaped under his own power, or whether he’s still under Hydra control, so I will reiterate what’s already been said.” He looks up and directly into the cameras again. “If you see him, do not engage. Call emergency services. He’s a highly trained operative, and aside from that, it’s pretty clear that he’s received some variation on the formula given to me. He has enhanced strength and reflexes. He has an advanced cybernetic prosthesis and, uh… trust me, you don’t want to be hit with that.”

Soft chuckles from the crowd, but Steve barely cracks a smile. He looks as wan and sick as Bucky sometimes remembers him being, back when he was skinny.

“One last thing, and then I’ll be taking questions.”

“Don’t, Steve, don’t you fuckin’ dare,” Bucky whispers, horrified.

“The Winter Soldier is, in fact, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes.”

The room explodes with shouts of surprise and barely contained excitement, but Steve keeps talking over them.

“It seems that he was given some version of the serum when he was captured in 1943, which allowed him to survive the... fall. There w-was--” and it’s this, the slight hitch in Captain America’s voice, the stutter, the barely perceptible crack, that brings silence and order to the room. “There was significant trauma, during the fall. The -- the arm, and a head trauma that… he appears to have had amnesia, which made it all the easier for them to… for the brainwashing.”

“Stevie,” Bucky says, even softer this time. “Buddy, don’t look at that stuff, don’t--you don’t need to do this, pal,” he says, even though it’s already fucking _done_ , clearly, but still…

Steve rubs a hand over his mouth. There may be a slight dent in the podium where he was gripping it. He looks up again, and Bucky can see that he’s ditching the script completely, ignoring whatever’s written down there.

“Look. I’m not deluding myself here. I know there’s a chance he may never remember. I know what he’s capable of, what Hydra has used him for. He’s dangerous. But. He’s as much a victim of Hydra as anyone. James Buchanan Barnes is an American hero. He’s a prisoner of war. This isn’t just about stopping him. This is about bringing him home.”

Bucky hurls the phone across the room. The fancy, extra durable case proves its worth when the corner stabs into the drywall and the phone sticks there, still hatefully broadcasting Steve’s voice through it’s tinny fucking speakers.

Bucky gets up and starts pacing. If he picks up the phone now, he’s going to break it, case or no case, and he doesn’t actually want to do that, so instead he paces to a soundtrack of Steve torturing himself.

“Captain Rogers, Captain Rogers!”

“Yes, Juanita?”

“Who is currently in charge of the manhunt, and do they have any leads on where the Winter Soldier is?”

“The Avengers are coordinating with the CIA task force and Interpol. I cannot comment on an ongoing investigation, but we have some reason to believe that Sergeant Barnes has escaped from Hydra.”

“If that’s true, why hasn’t he turned himself in?”

“To whom?” Stevie says, and Bucky has a violent lurch into the past, the face that Little Punkass Steve would make when he was hurting and had No Patience for Anyone’s Bullshit.  “To SHIELD? Our Secretary of State was a Hydra mole. The Vice President has been accused of treason.” Steve sighs. “I hope he knows that he can always come to me, but… I can understand why he might feel like he can’t.”

Now Bucky’s fist goes through the drywall.

“Next question. Yes, Mr. Cho.”

“Given your personal involvement, will you be recusing yourself from the investigation?”

“Yeah, Steve, will you?” Bucky growls, pulling his fist back out of the wall. It’s the metal one. It shivers a bit, plates rippling to dislodge the dust before it can gum up the inner workings. “Got no reason to keep torturing yourself, but hey, when has that ever fucking stopped you?”

And of course, Steve says: “I understand that this represents a pretty significant conflict of interest, but recusing myself won’t help anyone. I’m one of only a handful of people capable of overpowering Sergeant Barnes--”

“Yeah fucking right, you got _lucky,_ pal!”

“--I’m not going to ask law enforcement or military personnel to put their lives on the line just because this is going to be hard for me. Also, I’m the foremost living expert on Sergeant Barnes’s habits and history. The CIA task force is taking point on this, and I, along with all the Avengers, will be offering them all the assistance I can.”

“Captain Rogers! How do you feel, knowing that Bucky Barnes is still out there, that Hydra captured him?”

Outraged, Bucky yanks the phone out of the wall. There’s a long scratch on the screen now, and it’s covered in a light powdering of drywall dust, but he can see Steve’s expression, caught between shock and pain. He sees the moment when Steve clamps down on it, using his substantial internal stockpile of fury to force it back, force it down.

“How the hell do you think I feel?” He says, stiffly.

Bucky desperately closes out the video feed. He only breaks the screen a little more, a tiny crack appearing in the corner as his grip tightens. He tosses the phone onto his sleeping bag and turns his back on it.

He runs his hands through his hair, grips it in his flesh hand and tugs. Now that it’s silent in the room, he can hear how hard and fast his breathing has gotten, how ragged. His eyes are burning.

He’s… panicking. This is panic.

_This is about bringing him home… I hope he knows that he can always come to me._

Christ. He can’t do that. He can’t. What if the **MISSION PARAMETERS** come back? What if he goes under again and comes out the other side with **OBJECTIVE ACHIEVED: TERMINATION CONFIRMED** and the sound of Steve not breathing, that big dumb heart finally stopped for good?

Assuming they can even die. But Bucky’s not going to fucking risk it.

And--

And…

Well. No one said that Bucky Barnes was a model of altruism, Steve had that market pretty well cornered. And one of the pages in Bucky’s notebook is scrawled with _NO MORE HANDLERS_ in thirty different languages and 48 point font. Steve isn’t Hydra, but that doesn’t make his orders any less difficult to resist. Hydra may have hacked his brain, but near as he can tell, Steve was the original programmer. He didn’t even need to issue commands; he just had to lie there and let Bucky punch him, while dropping cheesy shit from their past. _I’m with you till the end of the line_ still makes shivery echoes in Bucky’s chest.

He needs to get as far away from this man as fucking possible.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so as a heads up, I'm going to post one more chapter (next week) and then I'm taking the month of July off for Camp NaNo, so there is a hiatus upcoming. A brief one! With a set end date! I'm just warning y'all so you can prepare yourselves for that.
> 
> If you need to cry about it, you can always come to [my fannish tumblr](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/) <3<3<3


	3. A Certain Smell will Take Me Back

##  [3: Stressed Out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf4euAs7LY8)

Sometimes **a certain smell will take me back** to when I was young  
How come I'm never able to identify where it's coming from  
\- by Tyler Joseph, 2015

 

 _This is getting out of hand,_ Bucky thinks as he gets his go bag and leaves everything traceable behind. He can’t carry on like this. He’s been on the back foot since DC, reacting like a cornered animal. He needs to get his shit together. He needs to get away. He needs to make a plan. A strategy. And for that, he’s going to need intel. 

He knows exactly where to get more intel. It's all  _there_ , in his head. He just needs a safe way to retrieve it.

 

* * *

 

This is what he does:

He gets supplies: water, rations, a rechargeable battery powered lamp. He buys more pens and a new journal (red this time, bigger, with graph paper inside.)

No wifi where he’s going. He drops a line to his online friends -- George and Jonah and Sachiko -- letting them know that he’s going to be out of touch for a while. He kind of wishes he could do the same for the folks at the God Damn Starbucks. But he can’t risk it. By now, someone there has probably called the tip line. Place is probably crawling with CIA. With Steve, maybe.

Anyway.

No wifi means boredom is going to be a real problem. He’s been in charge of himself for 107 consecutive days,  and he’s been noticing that the longer he goes, the more there is, inside him. It’s hard to put into words, but every hour of freedom he’s got under his belt, the more parts of his brain start lighting up. Or maybe he’s just getting better at identifying what the fuck is actually going on in his attic.

Point is: used to be, he was perfectly content to just stare at a wall and think about nothing for hours at a time. Until, one day, he recognized that the feeling suffusing him in those moments (a potent mix of static-under-the-skin and a dull heaviness) was _boredom._ Luckily he had the whole fucking internet back then. But he won’t now.

He hits up a used bookstore and buys three or four old paperbacks, since he has a vague memory of reading, sitting in an incredibly uncomfortable chair, his nose inches away from the page. The memory is vague because his awareness of his physical surroundings is dim compared to the imagined memory of being a big black cat on an alien planet, starving and ready to pounce on a crew of scientific explorers. Bucky-Then had felt fascination, disgust, and sympathy for the Black Destroyer. Bucky-Now just feels uncomfortable thinking about it, like one of those dreams where you’re naked in public.

He pokes carefully at some of his memories. How had he handled boredom before? He must have been bored sometimes, Back Then. How had he--

 _\--suppressed the urge to fidget in Church (when he still went to Church?) It had been easier, because they were forever supposed to stand up, sit down, sing, pray, etc etc. He doesn’t much like drawing comparisons between Church and…_ this.

_The wind changes. He glances at the wind gauge, waits a moment, does the calculations, and then changes his angle slightly. The guy is going to stand up eventually, but until he pokes his fucking Nazi head up high enough for Buck to get a bead, he’s stuck waiting._

_Sniping is so fucking_ boring _sometimes. At least in Church there’d been music._

_Bucky starts humming under his breath, very quietly. A moment later, a soft, deep chuckle fills the air just behind him._

_“Really Buck?”_

_“I’m bored and you ain’t much of a conversationalist,” Bucky whispers. “Shut up, I’m trying to focus here.”_

_Steve keeps chuckling softly. “Seriously though?_ Girl Crazy? _And you couldn’t go for_ Embraceable You?”

_“Listen, pal, this is my goddamn set, I’ll sing what I want to.”_

_They lapse into silence, and Bucky starts humming again. He thinks he can see movement over there, on the other side of no man’s land. If he can just stay focused…_

“I got rhythm,” _he sings, soft and half speed, like a record running down._ “I got music.” _Steve has gone still and silent behind him, and Buck supposes that it sounds a little spooky, the jazzy swing all slowed down and haunting._ “I got _\--”_

_And then the guy’s head comes up over the edge of the trench and the kickback of the shot punches hard into his shoulder. He brings the scope back down to--_

_“You got him?” Steve asks, quiet._

_Bucky lifts his head and the savage smile on his face is met with an equally savage smile from Steve._

_“Who could ask for anything more?” He says, dry as dust. Steve’s mouth twists a little and how had he--_

\--done it back then?

With music apparently. Just the thought brings a swirl of more. Sitting by the water while Steve sketches the bridge - - Little Steve, with his big hands, and Bucky singing _Time on my hands, you in my arms._ Watching the deacon light the candle, _Lumen Christi,_ and singing back _Deo gratias._ Sitting at the garage, waiting for Frank to bring him the part he needs, and singing _my life a hell you’re making_ while he thinks about how best to get shoeblack into Steve’s pale yellow hair, because Steve had started it with that trick with Bucky’s towel. _You know I’m yours just for the taking._

Bucky presses his middle finger against the spot between his eyes. Music, he thinks. Music is how he fills the time. How he used to anyway. And now that Hydra doesn’t have their filthy little fingers in his brain stem, he can put what he fucking wants in there. And he’s always liked music.

With this in mind, Bucky acquires a new phone and downloads as much music as he can, picking out random titles for maximum variety. He’s a little worried, browsing the internet, accessing his old accounts. He thinks back to that forum he’d been frequenting, the support group for superheroes. The moderator who’d deleted his account, and then hacked his laptop. He’s a little paranoid, he knows, but he thinks he’s got every right to be paranoid.

 

* * *

 

He stows away in the belly of a cargo ship. It’s not like he can take the Arm through customs after all.

He dislikes being in a shipping container. It makes him queasy with impending memories. But that’s… that’s kind of the plan, after all.

For the past few months he’s been skimming along the surface of his memories, pushing them away when they bob to the top like bloated corpses.

It’s high time for a deep dive.

And if it brings back the **MISSION PARAMETERS** then that’s okay. He’s on a mostly-empty cargo ship in the middle of the Atlantic. He can’t hurt Steve here. He’s locked in a shipping container. This is as safe as it’s gonna get.

He swallows thickly. He thinks they’re clear of port now, the engines chugging along far away. “Alright, Ace. Just you and me now.”

He gets his phone out, and uses his meat hand to untangle the earbuds. He turns on the rechargeable lamp and opens the new notebook. He’s still using the Smithsonian flyer as a bookmark. He puts in the headphones. He hits shuffle and picks up a pen. He swallows back bile and lets the memories come, lets them come out of the end of his pen and bleed onto the paper.

 

* * *

 

 

_Mission report: 15 June, 1943. The Queen Mary._

_You're in the belly of a ship, the whole world slightly unsteady, like you're almost tipsy all the time, the ground never quite where you left it. A lot of the guys are queasy and so are you but you ain't seasick. It's the same queasy you've had since you got the letter and realized you might die. Realized they were going to make you a killer whether you wanted it or not._

_Mission report: 17 August 1988. Bahawalpur._

_You put something in the plane. It has to be wired into the controls the night before the flight, and there is a remote detonator. You press the button and watch it go down. You count the bodies before emergency services arrive, to confirm. They are all dead. They are still burning._

_You are not supposed to want things._

_You want to hit something._

_There is no one to hit._

_Mission report: September 1928, Prospect Park._

_“Teach you to mind your fucking mouth, since your momma never did,” you snarl, and you put your fist into his face again --_

_Again--_

_Again._

_He doesn't say anything about you, or your ma, or your sisters after that._

_Mission report: 2 May, 1991. Berlin._

_There are five girls. They demonstrate perfect form. First position, demi plie, arabesque. They jump in unison, their feet flutter. They are perfect. And then they have knives, and they are still perfect. Jab, block, change grip, slip under the guard, knife between the vertebrae. Easy peasy. They smile at you. You try to remember how to smile back._

_Mission report: October, 1931. Vinegar Hill._

_You’re new in this neighborhood, and it’s important to establish yourself. You smile and smile and smile, even though your skin crawls, and you feel like a phony, and you don’t want anyone to look at you, maybe ever again. But you gotta smile. Because Steve sure as shit won’t, and someone’s gotta._

_And when the smiling don’t work, you use your fists._

_Mission report: January, 1944. Germany._

_Cleared a Hydra depot. Killed all the guards, but didn't have enough materiel to blow the base. So Captain Asshole rides in on his fuckin’ motorcycle and sets the self-destruct manually. Gets out by the skin of his goddamn teeth. Moron’s gonna give you a fuckin’ coronary one of these days. Jesus._

_You stare at the back of his head as he goes to deliver his report. If looks could kill he’d be six feet under, the reckless motherfucker._

_Mission report: September 1936. Vinegar Hill._

_You watch the back of his neck as you follow him up the stairs and wish he’d just cry, because God, his little shoulders shouldn’t have to carry this kind of weight. The dead look in his eyes kills you every time, and you want to just grab him and shake until all the grief falls out. You just want to pull him in and hold him down until he can let go, just a little. He shouldn’t have to hold it together like this. This shouldn’t have happened, not to him, not ever to him._

_Mission report: 7 January, 1990. Siberia._

_You shouldn’t have to tell her these things. She shouldn’t have to know these things, but…_

_“You can’t hesitate like that,” you tell her, in your cumbersome Russian. This girl, with the red hair and the seaglass eyes. She looks unsure._

_“Mishka, I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, low._

_You pat her, your big paw cradling the whole back of her neck. “I know, Lenushka,” you say._

_“Natashka,” she corrects, looking even sadder._

_Your head aches still. “I -- Sorry.” You suddenly feel overwhelmed, unsure._

_“It’s okay,” she says. So gentle. “It’s okay.”_

_Mission report: August, 1943. Italy._

_“It’s okay, soldier. You did great,” your CO is saying, and how can he_ say that? _You just fucking_ killed a man, _and it wasn’t in combat either, the poor bastard just wanted to take a piss and you_ shot him _from the other side of no-man’s-land. "Good shot," he says. Fuck._

_Mission report: 15 November, 1963. Location Unknown._

_It is one week until the deadline and you are a good shot, but you aren't ready. They want you to kill the president. You are confused. "The President of the United States?" you ask. You don't understand. He's your President, isn't he? He's a good man, isn't he?_

_Your programming is incomplete. They deem you unfit for the job. They punish you for that._

_Mission note: you have killed four presidents, just no American ones._

_Mission report: December, 1941. Red Hook._

_“A date that will live in infamy,” says the president, and your hand is steady -- it’s the rest of you that feels shaky. You’re staring at Steve, and you already know how this is going to play out. Steve’s got that look on his face. The_ 'this ain’t right' _look, which is always, inevitably, followed by the_ 'I, personally, am responsible for fixing it'  _look._

_The thing is, he ain’t wrong. Is he? This ain’t just a threat to England anymore. This ain’t a European problem, or an Asian problem. This war ain’t someone else’s fight anymore. It’s going to be America’s war, which means it’s going to be his da’s war, and his ma’s, and Christ, probably his sisters’ too._

_Mission report: January, 1924. Brooklyn_

_She is so small, but heavy in your arms. “Hold her like this, Jimmy, you don’t want her to hurt her head,” says your Da, and you make sure to crook your elbow just so. Her face is all scrunched up and red and she looks so dumb. Maybe she will be dumb, like Susy is sometimes, and maybe she’ll be mean, like Becca is_ all the time. _But you love them anyway, and you’ll love her too, because that’s your job now._

_“Hi Jeanie,” you say, soft, because you don’t want her to wake up and start crying again. “Donchu worry about nothin’ okay? I’m your big brother. You’re gonna be just fine.”_

 

* * *

 

 

Mission report, mission report, mission report. They flow off the end of his pen, a format that his brain slips into like a well-worn rut.  That’s probably a little sad, but it’s easy enough to process. The more that come, the more details bleed out, vivid in his head, but a jumbled mess on the page.

_Mission report: August 1938. Brooklyn._

_It’s too hot to be dancing like this, the air stifling around you and the music syrupy like molasses, thick and sweet--_

Blends with

_Mission report: 7 August 1972. London._

Sinnerman, where you gonna run to, oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to, _and the music, the_ music, _oh, it’s almost enough to have you walking away from the assignment, almost enough to have you crawling out of your hiding place because you want to figure out where that music is coming from, you want to find it and just fucking_ eat it _somehow._

Blends with

_Mission report: August 1921. Brooklyn._

_Teddy is coughing again, and you can hear Da gently shushing him._ You take the low road and I’ll take the high road, _he sings. It makes you sad, but you don’t know why._

 

* * *

 

There's not a peep from the  **MISSION PARAMETERS** or even the  **OPERATION PROTOCOL.** He doesn't know if they've just worn off, or his brain has healed, or what, but he's not getting even the faintest twinges from them. Which is good, because he doesn't think he could stop even if he wanted to.

Now that he’s started putting his memories down on paper, he’s terrified to stop, because what if he forgets again? What if he starts losing pieces of himself as his past fades into forgetfulness? How much has he lost already? Will he be able to get it all back?

He makes himself take breaks when his hand cramps up, to drink some water or eat something or even just listen to some music with his eyes closed. Once a day he uses his Super Spy Skills to sneak out to the crew area and use their showers and charge his phone. There is something about this that he finds very satisfying. It might be that cleanliness pleases him, but he thinks that it’s the silent fuck-you that it sends out in Hydra’s direction. Every time he uses his skills for something totally harmless and innocent, every time he treats himself like a person rather than a weapon, it feels like defiance. Now that he’s not fucking terrified all the fucking time, he really likes the feeling of defiance.

The memories are another fuck-you to Hydra. He knows, because he’s starting to remember how much trouble they went through to keep him from remembering...

_Mission report: 7 May, 1991_

_They don’t realize you’re conscious, as they take you out of the restraints. You can’t move. You can barely breathe, the pain is so bad. Everything aches. You brought it on yourself. You shouldn’t have said the thing. The name. You remembered the name. The number. They tell the Handler what you said, what you remember._

_“Fuck,” says the Handler, in Russian. “Wipe him. Freeze him.”_

_“Sir,” says the tech, surprised. “He’s sustained a lot of damage, we should--”_

_“He can take it. Wipe him. Freeze him.”_

_This is the thing they don’t say: you’re no use to them if you remember. Better you should die than you should wake up knowing who you are._

 

* * *

 

He takes a break from the red journal of memories to dip back into the space journal.

He’s been thinking of that journal, the one he got from the NASM, as a kind of user manual. It’s full of instructions to himself, things like the “do not comply” order and notes about how much sleep/food/exercise he requires to maintain optimal functionality. It’s also got a fair few pages that are just gibberish, or darkly drawn sketches of disembodied eyes, figures, the tank, the chair, all angrily crossed out so deeply that the pages ripped through.

Hey, mental organization is a skill that he is re-acquiring, he’s allowed to be a little crazy sometimes.

He flips to a blank page and titles it:

_MISSION NOTES: MEMORY LOSS AND RE-ACQUISITION_

_Healing factor begins restoring memories after 72 hours.  Complete restoration in ???_

_3 primary methods of memory suppression:_

  * __The Tank. Ice crystal buildup and subsequent damage blocks access to long-term memories completely for a given amount of time__


  * _The Chair. More like mixing up the memories than blocking them. Whisks the brain like scrambled fucking eggs._


  * _The Goddamn Words. Doesn’t make the memories go, just------------_



 

Bucky shudders and his pen slips. He hates the words. He can’t remember what they are exactly, but he remembers what they feel like. They feel like iron on his limbs, like being made into a puppet, like falling from the train all over again. They make his entire _self_ into a scream and then lock the scream in a soundproofed room and put the room on a train and send the train far away and then he wakes up later and--

 

 

 

 

 

\--He wakes up cold and shivering. The lantern went out while he was freaking out on the floor. He crawls over to it and starts turning the crank to recharge it. It's oddly soothing. The repetitive nature of the task slowly brings him back into himself, brings him back from wherever he went. It wasn't the  **MISSION PARAMETERS** taking over, or anything like that. He just panicked and went blank. That happens sometimes. It's a glitch of some sort. 

He doesn’t feel the need to read over what he wrote. He drinks some water, eats some of the rations. He listens to music. By the time he's heard "Mr. Brightside," "Uptown Funk" and Toto's "Africa," his brain has very effectively reset. It is impossible to remain sad and anxious after listening to those songs, in that order. 

He gets out the red notebook again and digs into the memories.

 

* * *

 

Four days into his journey, this happens: a string of memories bubble up one after the other after the other, like buoys on a line. He scribbles like a man possessed, drawn through them by the thread of something -- something --

 

_February 1932, Brooklyn._

_“Did you know that cousin Arnie’s a queer?” Becca says, her voice a little muffled because the two of you are under the blankets together, had been reading pulps together but now you’re just talking._

_“Arnie?” you say. “Nah, he can’t be. He’s… He never seemed…”_

_Becca shrugs. “Auntie Miriam said so. She was crying about it. Maybe you don’t have to look queer to be queer, you know?”_

_A lot of things fall into place. A question you didn’t know you were asking suddenly has an answer. An alarm goes off, somewhere in your head. Time’s up._

_February 1945, The Alps._

_Time’s up, you think, staring at the gun in your hand like somehow it’ll just grow new bullets. You press your back against the wall of the train. All you can do is wait now, wait until the other guy realizes you’re empty and comes to put you down. Out of options. You don’t want to die like this, you don’t--_

_The door slides open and there’s Steve, Steve’s dumb face and that dumb helmet and he’s got his service revolver ready to toss to you and Christ you could kiss him for this, stupid getup and all.  Steve’s here and that means it ain’t over, means the mission ain’t done yet._

_August 1933, Brooklyn._

_“You’re gonna have it all, Rogers,” you say, and that’s the mission, now. If God ain’t gonna look after Steve Rogers, then James Barnes has gotta pick up the fucking slack, right? Not just a wife and a brownstone by the park, Steve’s gonna be fat and happy if you have to personally shove sandwiches into his dumb face until he can’t stand it anymore. Steve’s gonna be a comic book artist, a famous artist, his shit hangin’ in museums._

_January 1945, the Austrian Border._

_He’s all bent over his sketchbook, frowning in concentration. Still an artist, despite everything. When he’s like this, you can almost see the old him there, all bird bones and crooked nose, overlaid on the big, new body._

_Someone calls his name. Well. Not his name. The other guy’s name. Steve sets the sketchbook aside and goes._

_You don’t let yourself think about it. You just pick it up and start flipping through. This is the same one that Steve had back when he was on the bond circuit, and the early pages are full of cramped sketches. Trains, and stages, and a chorus girl on a motorcycle, smirking. There's the Steve-monkey in the Cap getup, performing in a circus, standing awkwardly among men in suits, being packed away in a_ cage _with all the other circus animals._

_“Ah Stevie,” you say softly, heart breaking._

_After that, there’s lots of sketches of the Howlies; sleeping between action, horsing around on the beach, cleaning their weapons while they wait. There’s pictures of London’s skyline, peppered with barrage balloons. That all ain’t so bad._

_But then there’s Normandy. Their whole beach, after the fighting stopped, laid out across two pages in excruciating, unnatural detail. And there’s a picture of you, the shadows heavy around you, looking dangerous and nightmarish, in a church spire in Paris. There are ruined cities, a man sprawled out dead in the snow, a dark suggestion of blood pooling around him. There’s a pile of too-skinny bodies, and --_

_And you know it’s always like this in his head, now: each individual corpse perfectly rendered._

_You'd give anything to protect him from this._

_“--and we’ll be out of range for the next week at least,” Steve is saying, and you hastily put the sketchbook back where you found it._

_February 1939, Brooklyn._

_You’ve never wanted to be an artist, really, that’s his thing, but you wish you could capture this. You maybe wish you coulda caught it on camera. The perfect arch of Steve’s whole body as he threw everything he had into that punch, and it connected, like the Bambino pitching a perfect game, and the guy just went_ down.

 _Your mouth goes dry. You feel like_ you’re _the one who got clocked on the jaw._

_And then he turns, looks at you, disbelieving triumph and fierce, savage joy. Damn. Victory is a good look on him._

_June 1944, France._

_Who knew that victory could look like this?_

_Steve’s head bows so you can’t see his face. He rubs the heels of his hands against his closed eyes, like a toddler that needs to go down for a nap. The back of his neck is gritty, the dark blond hairs made darker with sweat and dirt and other things, worse things, but the skin is soft and pale and vulnerable above the collar of his uniform. You put your hand there, curl your fingers around the place where he’s unprotected, and squeeze, gently._

_“Did I do okay?” he asks, slurring a little, and it shouldn’t make you feel like you’re melting inside, but it does._

_“You did fine, Stevie. You did great.” You work your fingers and thumb into the taut muscle. He melts a little too, head hanging forward, listing towards you. “You were unstoppable.” And he was -- God, was he ever. A one-man army. But now, in the moments after, he looks as breakable as he ever did when he was small._

_January 1937, Brooklyn._

_He’s so..._ small, _shrunken in a way that terrifies you. He’s drenched with sweat, mumbling. He barely recognizes you. His breath sounds like it’s bubbling in his chest. It’s a death rattle, you think, terrified._

_You gotta find a way to get him out of this shithole apartment. It's killing him._

_The cough takes him like a seizure, sudden and hard, making his whole frame tense and shake. It’s the exhaustion that will get him. If he gets too tired to keep fighting, he’ll die, just choke to death on nothing at all._

_You have to sit him up. Rub his back. Talk him through it. Remind him how breathing works. He smells like sweat and there's a familiar tang of sickness in it. You couldn't describe it, but you know it; this ain’t the first time you've helped Steve through something like this. You're so scared that it's going to be the last time though. You’re always scared of that._

_He just has to keep breathing. He has to. You don’t know what you’ll do without him._

_Sometime after 1978. Could be anywhere._

_You’re in the Chair. Breathing hard when the paddles pull away and leave you, still shaking, still twitching. Your head aches. You can’t remember-- you can’t--_

_Something’s missing._

_Someone._

_You look for him, and look for him, and you never, ever see him._

_July 1931, Brooklyn._

_You’re on your way to see Steve. He’s in the hospital because Billy Thompson broke his ribs. But it’ll be the last time: you made sure of that. You made sure that Billy’s dad found out and after the beating he got, Billy won’t dare show his face._

_That is when you hear the news: Billy Thompson’s body washed up on the riverside. Fell off the bridge. Or jumped._

_You think of Steve’s scream -- Steve who hadn’t screamed when three kids were beating the crap out of him, but he sure screamed when Billy Thompson was kicking him hard enough to break ribs. You think of Billy Thompson hitting the water. Dead on impact. Terrible thing, they say. So young, they say. So troubled, they say._

_So dead, now._

_You think: Oh good._

_And then, you think:_ Oh god.

_And maybe you didn’t push him with your hands, but you set him up to take the fall, and you’re old enough to know what that means, you’re old enough to take responsibility. You think you’re probably going to hell for this._

_And later it makes sense. You_ would _go to hell for Steve. Of course you would. You did._

_November 1943, Kreichsberg._

_You must be dead and against all the odds you seem to be in heaven, because there he is, and he’s smiling at you like -- like he --_

_April 1934. Brooklyn._

_He’s smiling at you, kind of. He looks like he’s been hit over the head with a brick. You feel like you’ve been hit over the head with a brick. When you told him that dames liked a guy who listened, you didn’t think it would actually_ work. _But there he is, out on the dance floor, with Greta’s friend Ruth in his arms._

_They turn a little and Ruth’s dark curls block Steve from view. All you can see is Steve’s skinny arm curled around her waist, his hand resting at a gentlemanly height, pressed against her back, just below her shoulder blades._

_“Bucky?” says Greta, and you realize you got distracted, missed a step, while you were trying to catch a glimpse of Steve’s blond mop._

_ July 1930, Brooklyn. _

_There’s three kids there, at the end of the alley. In the gaps between them, you catch glimpses of a tousled blond head, two fists raised. Bright blue eyes, glaring._

_You don’t know it yet, but there’s a countdown that’s just started. A timer, set, waiting to go off. A question, asked. The answer is coming._

 

_ Mission note: You love him. _

 

_ Additional note: He can never know. _

 

Bucky throws the book aside. It hits the rusty wall and slides down, limp and half the pages folded awkwardly underneath. He gets up, paces the length of the shipping container and back, breathing hard through his nose.

Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Look, it’s not like he didn’t have his suspicions, right? I mean, he could remember saying _end of the line_ with a hand on a skinny, bony shoulder. Yeah pal, that’s a real #nohomo moment there. And it’s not like Steve doesn’t love him back -- in every way that counts for anything at least. _I want to bring him home,_ and the face Stevie made before saying _how the hell do you think I feel?_ These are facts, burned into his sorry-ass excuse for a brain like brands, except that brands don’t stick on Bucky (he knows from personal experience) and this ain’t gonna come out, not even with gallons of bleach, he can just tell.

He shouldn’t be surprised by this. He knows he shouldn’t. So why is his breath coming fast and shallow? Why is his heart rabbiting in his chest? Why?

The thing is that he’s got memories now. Not all of them are from the 40s. He remembers his old handlers, and

_\-- the arm pulls back, and then batters nearly through Lukin’s face in one blow. He hits Lukin two more times, until the skull crunches through into the soft tissue within. It’s appropriate. He has his fingers in Lukin’s brains, and--_

\-- he knows what it feels like to have a handler that he hates, and --

_\-- a hand falls on his shoulder and he twitches away, but the hand stays, squeezes. It doesn’t hurt yet, but he cannot recall ever being touched without violence. The touch is warm and firm it makes a smell come up in the back of his throat, in his mind -- pine needles and sap, cordite, and --_

\-- he knows what it feels like to have a handler that he likes, that --

_\-- handler. Karpov. He would die for this handler. He doesn’t know why, but he knows that --_

\-- and he knows what it feels like to be betrayed by a handler that he liked. He knows what it feels like to be sold out -- _literally sold,_ there was an actual _bill of fucking sale_ \-- and he can’t trust the voice in his head that says “Stevie wouldn’t do that” because half the voices in his head say “Heil Hydra” out of goddamn habit.

Steve says he’s a friend. But that’s what handlers always want him to think. And if he loves Steve, then that just means that he’s all the more dangerous. And if… if Steve loves him, then that’s… that’s dangerous too. For Steve.

He sings down, his back pressed into the corner of the shipping container. He puts his head in his hands.

 

* * *

 

It takes him twenty four hours to pick up the notebook again. Nothing has changed, significantly. The mission is the same. Get away from Steve. Stay away from Steve. Put yourself together. Remembering is part of that. So.

He smooths out the creases, flips to a new page, lets his mind wander, and starts a new mission report.

 

_November 2004. Gaza Strip._

_They used you to place the polonium. They didn’t give you gloves, and you were sick the next time they took you out of the tank._

 

He draws a line under the mission report before starting another.

 

_Fuckin Mission goddamn report some cold as hell forest in the middle of goddamn nowhere. 1944. Steve went too far ahead, like an idiot, and you--_

 

Bucky blinks hard and cocks his head to one side, a hard twitch as something realigns in his skull.

 

_There was a fight, but it ain’t the fight that matters. What matters is this: Steve’s a dumb punk, and Captain America is an asshole. He’s an asshole with no goddamn comprehension that there are people out there who care if he fucking dies. He’s an asshole who gets himself shot. He’s an asshole who gets himself shot in the leg and nicks an artery and lies there bleeding out with my fingers pressed hard against the wound, warm blood on my fingers, trying to keep his big dumb heart from stopping. Because this is my goddamn life now, apparently. Jesus Christ._

 

Bucky frowns at that. He flags it, folding the corner down on the page and putting a star next to the report. He flips back through the pages. He flags a few more mission reports. Some from the war, but not all. Plenty from before the war, too. Not every mission with Steve, but a lot of them. There’s a pattern here that he’s not seeing. He’ll need to look into it.  Later.

And anyway. Ain’t like everything’s about Steve all the time or nothing.

 

* * *

 

 _It’s spring 1923 and I know I ain’t supposed to be hearing this, but I can’t_ not _hear it, can’t_ stop _hearing it._

_“George, it ain’t real,” Ma is saying, desperate. Her voice is muffled, but not muffled enough. “Love, you ain’t there anymore, you’re safe, I promise, Love, come on, look at me.” Even in the dark I can see that Becca’s eyes are open too, white showing all the way around._

_“It’s gonna be okay,” I tell her. “S’just cuz it’s spring. You know he hates spring.”_

_The baby starts crying._

 

_It’s 1941 and Arnie is maybe drunker than I am. None of ma’s family can hold their liquor to save their damn lives, and Arnie’s no exception but Arnie gets--_

_Well, he needs someone to watch his back when he’s drunk, because Arnie’s more than just a little queer, he’s_ a lot _queer. And when he’s three sheets to the fuckin wind like this, he’s downright aggressive about it._

 _“You gotta problem with it, sweetheart?” Arnie shouts, voice high and angry and laughing all at once, and that means it’s time to go. “Come on doll,” Arnie says, fluttering his eyelashes at the guy, who’s going red in the face. It’s like a damn countdown clock. T-minus three shades of red till full meltdown. “Don’t be like_ that, _honey!”_

_And then I’m saying: “Okay, cos, let’s get outta here, huh? Let’s just--”_

 

_It’s November 1921 and Ma still hasn’t taken off her black. Neither has Da. They ain’t talking to each other and they ain’t talking to to Becca and they ain’t talking to me, and I don’t much feel like talking but that don’t make it easier. The house is too quiet without Teddy’s coughs filling up the blank spaces. I never thought I’d miss the sound of someone coughing._

 

_It’s 1944 and we’re all on leave in England. Steve’s in one of his interminable meetings so I’m out at a pub with the guys and Howard, because when Stark says he knows a place and he’ll get you all in, you say yes. You just do. Somehow the Blitz hasn’t touched this place. Somehow it’s clean and pristine. There’s a full band playing, and a woman who might well be Vera Lynn, but I don’t want to ask and look stupid. I feel like I've got five country’s worth of mud under my fingernails and even though my dress uniform looks good -- I know it does -- I still feel like it’s drenched in blood._

_“Hell of a place,” Gabe says. His eyes are like saucers, and his expression is complicated, hard to read --_

_Of course it is. Place like this -- back home he’d only see a place like this if he was wearing a waiter’s uniform. It hits me hard, for some reason. Real hard all of a sudden. The wrongness of it.  Gabe deserves better than this._

_“Come on boys!” Howard says, in his big brazen way, clapping us both on the shoulder and--_

 

_It’s December, 1991 and Howard is looking up at me -- Jesus Christ -- from a dirty road and there’s blood on his face, but it’s his bones underneath. He’s barely recognizable. It’s the voice that does it. “Sergeant Barnes?” he says and it’s--_

_It’s like I’m on the rails, can’t deviate, can’t so much as look left or right. I bring my fist back and--_

 

_It’s --_

_2002._

_Natasha and Anya are here, back to back to back with their knives and --_

_I shouldn’t be proud of them for being good at this. Should I? But I am. They’re so fucking good at this. Couldn’t be prouder. Got no business being proud of them. They ain’t -- they ain’t_ mine _to be proud of._

 _But if they ain’t mine, then whose are they? Sure as hell ain’t the Red Room’s. Sure as hell ain’t_ Hydra’s. _They’re their own -- maybe they’re each others’. Maybe that’s--_

 

_It’s 1945 and I’m back to back with Steve and--_

 

Christ. It keeps coming back to Steve. So much of his history has nothing to do with Steve, but so much _does._

 

_It’s summer 1930 and you’re twelve and I’m thirteen -- lucky thirteen and I guess I’m responsible for my actions now, buddy, had the bar mitzvah and everything. Thirteen and there’s this skinny blond kid and Oh. Hey there. Might as well be responsible for you too, right?_

_It’s summer 1934 and “you’re my best friend.” I’m saying it again, yet again, and how many times am I gonna say it before you say it back? Do you even realize? You’re so stuck in your own head, eyes so bad you can’t even see past your own goddamn nose. “You’re part of the package, right?” Geddit Steve? You hearing me pal?_

_It’s summer 1943 and I’m walking away from you. I don’t know if you see it, don’t know if you put it together. Probably not. You’re an idiot. But it’s summer 1943, and that means it’s been thirteen years since we met and that means that I’ve known you for more than half my lifetime, and now I always will. The math just gets better from here. More than half my life with you, from here on out._

_(It’s 1980, a sticky July and I’m waiting for the Target and I can hear through the walls, through the floor:_ we don’t need no education. we don’t need no thought control. _And it’s been half a century since I met you but I don’t know it right now, won’t realize it until later)_

_It’s 1945 and I’m ready to die for you, but I’m not ready to die._

_It’s 1931 and I didn’t realize I was ready to kill for you, but I was. I did. I will again._

_It’s 2014 and you’re looking at me and you ain’t scared. Why ain't you scared?_

 

* * *

 

 _It is a sunsoaked afternoon, and I am tired all the way down to my bones. I can hear the soft scritch-scratch-scritch of your pencil on paper, and faintly, distantly, someone is listening to Glenn Miller. Moonlight Serenade._  
  
_The heat of a Brooklyn summer is thick as taffy all around us. The sunlight glows orange through my eyelids. My muscles are like stretched out rubber bands. I was -- I think I was at the docks that day. Moving boxes for my Da. Worked hard and long but it’s a good kinda sore. Warm and tired._  
  
_I’m right on the edge of sleep, toeing the line, drifting. I'm floating on the sound of Glenn Miller, and you, drawing. Anything is possible: aliens might invade New York, or Katharine Hepburn might ask me for a light, or you might run your fingers through my hair and lean in and --_  
  
_Well. It's nice to think about, anyway._

 

* * *

 

_It’s 194--no please i don’t want to remember this i don’t-----_

 

Bucky wakes up in a cold sweat on the final day of his journey, the day the ship is due in port. He pants into the darkness and stares up at nothing and sees something long ago and far away.

“Barnes, James Buchanan,” he mumbles at the ceiling in a voice that is small and shaking and terrified. “Sergeant. 3255-- 325570… 3… 8…”

He shudders. There are no restraints. Shivering, he gets up. He cranks the light until it’s charged enough to fill his corner of the shipping container with a dim glow. He picks up his pen and the journal. It’s almost full now. He’ll need another one when he reaches land. This will be the last entry. It’s the most important, he thinks. The _most_ important.

 

_Here's a hilarious story for you._

_I know how you survived the serum. I don’t think_ **_you_ ** _know. But I do. I know how it works. I figured out the fucking trick of it. It's real simple and real hard all at the same time. I ain’t never told anyone and I never will._

_Erskine was maybe right about the serum magnifying what's inside. Good becomes great, he said, according to you. Yeah. Good becomes great and bad becomes worse, sure. I saw you before and after, so I’ll add a few observations of my own. A self-sacrificing idiot becomes a moron with a goddamn death wish. Mr. Wise Guy becomes Captain Fucking Asshole. And three gallons of fight in a half-pint jar becomes a whole ocean of stupid in a three-gallon tank._

_I get it. You just wanted to be seen. You thought you had so much to prove, but no one was looking, no one would look at you long enough to let you prove it._

_I was looking, pal. I promise I was._

_Me, I just wanted people to look the other way. Maybe that’s why I didn’t turn out quite like you. From the time I was fourteen I didn’t want anyone looking at me. From the time I was six I knew that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. I didn’t want to be seen, and boy oh boy did the serum oblige._

_But there’s one thing between you and me that’s just the same. Here's the trick: if you give fear the serum, it’ll kill you dead._

_And you, ya self sacrificing dumb punk, you weren’t afraid of dying, were you? Weren’t afraid of nothin’, cuz you and death been playing chicken since you were about two years old. You never blinked. Not once. And you didn’t the day you went into that machine._

_And me?_

_Well hell, by the time Zola took me, I was too tired to be scared. That’s the only thing that made me any different from the other poor schmucks -- the ones who died with the serum burning them up from the inside. They were still scared, and me? I’d already given up. I was so damn tired pal. Tired of working in the factory, tired of the war. Tired of killing. Tired of watching you get sicker and sicker. Tired of pretending I didn’t love you. I was too tired to be scared. I was just ready for it to be done._

_The fear didn’t come until after._

_It makes you an animal, you know. Fear. I don’t know if you know that. You ever actually been scared? You musta been, but seems like you never showed it. Fear makes you an animal, makes all the animal parts of you come alive and start howling._

_Well I was howling, pal. The inside of my head, just howling. And my dumb mouth, trying to remind me I was human. Name, Rank, Serial Number. 32557038, because animals don’t do numbers, do they? Sergeant, because I earned it, I wasn’t gonna let them take it away. James Buchanan Barnes, because my momma gave me that name, wasn’t gonna let any fuckin squid Nazis take--_

_But they did. In the end. Christ._

_So anyway. There I am, lying on a fuckin table in a basement._

_And then there you are, golden as Prometheus in the fountain. You were always like that, you know. Perfect, and shining, bringing light to mankind, all that sappy shit. So I didn’t notice, at first, what they’d done to you, because you looked like a dream. You always looked like a dream. Light in the darkness. Fire to mankind. My dream in the nightmare. God help me. What did they do to you, pal? What did they do to us?_

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all I have to plug Mandarou's Til The End of the Timeline again, because I used it A Lot for this chapter.
> 
> Second of all, this is bye bye for now. I'm taking July off to work on original fiction for CampNaNo but I assure you I'll be back in a month or so with more Sad Supersoldiers and Softe Assassins. You can still come crying to me on my fannish tumblr [here.](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Lastly, thanks to the Gal Pal who betas like a god damn hero. And thanks to everyone who reads and kudoses and comments, you guys are the Best and I love each and every one of you. <3<3<3


	4. Make Amends with All My Shadows

##  [4: I Of The Storm](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlCkafSYNJI)

If I could face them  
If I could **make amends with all my shadows**  
I'd bow my head and welcome them  
\- by Of Monsters and Men, 2015.

 

He gets off the boat without being seen, either by cameras or people. He’s in France, not too far from Normandy, he knows, and feels a twinge of a memory. He pauses, closes his eyes, and shakes his head.

He’s got Normandy back already. It’s written down. It’s safe. He doesn’t need to remember it right now.

The twinge subsides. He’s just starting to feel like this is going to work. He’s got a better handle on his memories, he’s safely made it out of the US and away from Steve--

And then he comes around the corner of a warehouse and finds himself face to face with Captain America.

Or rather, Captain America’s head, twelve feet tall and spraypainted on the side of a concrete wall. He's staring out and slightly up, like he’s contemplating how to win a fight with the sun. They really captured his fucking essence there, didn't they. He’s massive and pissed off and Bucky feels so small, by comparison. He feels like he’s shrinking.

And then he notices the speech bubble next to his head -- the words just as tall as he is and scrawled in angry red.

_VA TE FAIRE FOUTRE, HYDRA!_

Bucky barks out a rusted, creaking laugh, then puts his hood up and moves off into the shadows.

 

* * *

 

There are plenty of Hydra drop points in Europe. Bucky hits up the oldest and least used ones. It's easy to sneak past the security, steal cash and intel, and get out.  He bounces around, never uses the same exact MO, and never hits the same country twice. The cells aren’t great at cross-communication, and with everything in uproar, most of his thefts should get written off as isolated defections. Not surprising, given the current political climate.

He never takes guns. He’s decided. He doesn’t do that anymore.

He stays in hostels, passes himself off as a backpacker, pays in cash, speaks the local language. He never stays more than a week. He is running. He knows this. He is running, and running, and running. But he can handle it, the lack of rest, the constant wary alertness, the stress of moving and moving, and watching and watching. It’s almost like being back at war. The old war. His war with Steve. But with less mud and no blood to speak of at all.

He feels like he’s doing pretty well, all things considered, when he gets the text.

 

* * *

 

He’s in Berlin. His phone pings. He doesn’t recognize the number. The text just says:

_Mishka?_

And his breath catches. Someone bumps into him and he moves aside, ducks into an alley. The glow of his phone screen is the only light back here, bright and blue across his face.

The only people who ever called him Mishka were the girls. The Widows. _Natashka,_ he thinks, and his heart tries to crawl out of his mouth.

He is not. Panicking.

He is maybe panicking.

Okay, okay. They sometimes called him that in front of the handlers. Once or twice. It could be a trap. He tries to think. What can he say? A counterphrase, something only Natasha would know. Only the Widows, but not their handlers.

He remembers: a conversation, long ago. Just before she defected. Sitting in a room, waiting for extraction, trading secrets he knew he’d never remember. But then he had -- that’s come back along with everything else. And he remembers what they used to call each other. The girls. The Widows.

 _Alianovna?_ He texts back. Someone impersonating Natasha would answer _yes_ , and he waits, breathless for the reply.

 _Nyet,_ appears on the screen. _Drakovna,_  follows a moment later.

Their secret name for themselves. Drakov, because that was the only name the Russians gave him. They told the girls “Drakov, his name is Drakov” and so they called themselves, in secret, _Drakovna._ Drakov’s daughters. And there’s only one left. Only one it could be.

 _Where?_ He texts, with hands that shake.

She sends him coordinates. They're in Bucharest.

 

* * *

 

The location is a club. When he arrives in Bucharest, the club hasn’t opened for the night, so he walks through the city to kill time. He visits a couple of museums, and eventually finds himself staring at a collection of anti-war posters going all the way back to the 30s. They're on loan from a Polish collection of popular art. He stares at them; their bold colors and bolder statements about the brutality of war. He can't help thinking about tonight, about what might happen.

Natalia, the rest of the girls… He knows he should have done better by them. Should have gotten them out, kept them safe, kept them from having to kill. He can’t imagine a realistic scenario where he was actually able to do that. He knows he did the best he could. He knows he should have tried to do more.

But that’s all in the past. In the present, he has more pressing difficulties. There are three possible outcomes, as best he judges it.

  1. This is a trap set by Hydra. If it is, he can handle that. They made him nearly unstoppable, after all. If they try to take him back, they will pay for that mistake.
  2. This is not a trap, and Natasha just wants to talk. Just wants to help, maybe. Possibly. Just wants to know he’s okay. Or… Well. The last two times he’s seen her, he put a bullet in her, so more likely…
  3. This is a trap set by Natasha. That’s the best possible outcome, probably. She’ll make sure that he doesn’t go back into service, either for Hydra or some other shadowy government organization. She promised, long ago. And. She’s an Avenger isn’t she? Being caught by the Avengers wouldn’t be the worst thing. He'd have to see Steve again. He might even be ready for that. Maybe.



He stares down a poster from some long-dead union. Red men flying on a white and blue background, all blocky abstract shapes and bold colors. Red, white, and blue. He wonders if Steve would like this exhibit. Steve, in his memory, was always more into the practical side of art. Illustrations and advertisements. Comics and drawing from life. Leyendecker and Rockwell. Joe Shuster and H G Peter. Those kinda guys, not so much this modern stuff.

He experiences a moment of dissonance. _This Modern Stuff_ is fifty years old or older.

Christ.

 

The club opens just after sunset and Bucky makes his way there in time to blend in with the first big crowd. There’s a lazy bouncer not paying much attention, and Bucky’s tight jeans and dark leather jacket are nice enough to get him in, despite his slightly grimy hair, his stubble, and the fact that he maybe hasn’t slept since he got the text.

He makes a beeline for the bar, for the simple reason that he cannot bear to have too many bodies pressed in around him. Public transport is hard enough. It makes him feel like his skin is buzzing. He’s recovering, still. For the last seventy years (or about seven, if his math is right, which it usually is) the only only times he’s been touched have involved violence. That does things to your brain. Of course it does.

So he watches the crowds of people starting to swarm the dance floor, and wonders. He's getting better. He used to dance, he knows. He’s got enough memories of that. Maybe... 

But that’s not what he’s here for, he’s--

“Hello, Mishka.”

He turns sharply to the bar and finds--

There’s a woman, one of the bartenders, standing there, smiling at him.

She isn’t Natasha.

But she’s not Hydra either. He knows. She’s not Hydra, not anymore.

“Yelena?” he says, the shock too deep to say anything else.

“Elena,” she corrects quietly, a meaningful look in her eye. “Elena Văduvă.”

Cover name, he registers. “Pleasure to meet ya,” he says, feeling numb.

The last time he saw her, she was… maybe eighteen? Tall and statuesque and blonde and sad-eyed. That had been the last time.

She went missing, the other girls said. She died, they said.

On a job in Romania. In _Bucharest._

Jesus Christ.

She’s still tall and statuesque, but her eyes seem less sad. Her hair is still blonde, but she’s hacked it short, shorter than his now. She’s got it slicked back, more like his used to be, back in the day.

“Hi,” he says, stunned like a bird that's just hit a window.

“Hi,” she says, laughing with her eyes.

He tries, and fails, to gather his thoughts. “We should. Talk. Can we… is there somewhere we can talk?” he asks. He feels thrown by this. Doesn’t know how to process.

She nods. She waves at her coworker, the other bartender there. Then she jerks her chin for Bucky to follow, and he does. This might be a bad idea. She used to be the best of them; the fastest and the strongest of all the Widows. She could be working for anyone now.

But even at her best, she wasn’t better than him. She wasn't stronger than the Arm.

She just lets him into the back room -- the break room, with a table and a buzzing light overhead and a minifridge. Like any other break room. She sits down and her body language is open, easy. But she was always good at that.

“You’re looking pretty good for someone who’s supposed to be dead,” he says, without taking a seat.

“Back atcha,” she replies.

“How did you find me?” he asks, wary.

She sighs and lifts a brow. “Well. Everyone’s got hobbies, right? Mine is… I run an online forum. A support group... for supers.”

Realization hits. _“You’re_ Miss Moderator?”

She shrugs one shoulder.

“You got me kicked out of the forums for not being a super,” he accuses. “You _know_ I’m a super.”

“In my defense, the only thing I knew for sure was that you knew too much about the Red Room,” she says. “I didn’t realize who you were until your boyfriend made his little announcement and got the whole world looking for you.”

Bucky closes his mouth with a snap.

“I'm not a magician, I still had to trace you. You changed phones. You been off the grid since the announcement." Her brow furrows. There are wrinkles there that weren't there when she was young. "I’ve been _looking_ for you. I was _worried.”_

Bucky looks away. She was _worried._ About _him._ _God, why?_  he wants to ask. _Why don’t you just hate me?_

“So what do I call you?” she asks. “Bucky?” She enunciates carefully, and there’s a laugh in her eye. It’s a ridiculous name. She’s allowed to laugh.

“Mishka is fine,” he mutters. "Christ."

“How are you doing?” she asks, more seriously.

“How are _you_ even _here?”_ he shoots back, ignoring the question.

She shrugs. “I faked my death so I could retire. Which, compared to _your_ story is actually pretty tame.”

Bucky swallows. “Did any of the others--?”

And there’s the sadness behind her eyes again. “As far as I know it’s just me and Natasha.”

Bucky finally takes a seat across from her at the rickety table. He leans in on his elbows and bows his head. It was stupid to think -- twenty minutes ago he thought that Natasha was the only one that got out. Now he knows that Yelena survived too, but it’s like he’s feeling the loss all over again. Anya and Katya and Tanya. “Does she know? Natasha, I mean.”

Yelena shakes her head. “I couldn’t… it’s too dangerous. She’s too famous now. People are watching her. I can’t risk it.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he honestly doesn’t know what he’s sorry for: everything that she went through, or the fact that she can’t reach out to Natasha, or the fact that he couldn’t save them, back then. He failed them. “I’m so fucking sorry, Lenushka.”

“It’s okay.” Her hand curls around his forearm and squeezes. He tries not to jump at the touch. “Sometimes you can only save yourself, right?”

His head goes up. “Did I tell you that?” he asks. He thinks he remembers -- but so much of that time is blurry with fear and pain.

“I think you told us all that at one point or another.” She tips her head to one side. 

He rubs his face, sniffing hard. He's not crying. His cheeks are scratchy with stubble, but they're dry.

“How are you, Mishka?” she asks again.

“Been worse,” he says.

“You have a place to stay? A safe place? You have money? A job?”

He stares at her. He can’t quite fathom that. Staying in one place? Getting a job? _Functioning like a normal person?_ “I have money?” He thinks of the rolled bundles of cash, carefully doled out, carefully counted. “Some.”

She squeezes his arm. “Let me help you.”

“Lena,” he says, warning. “You think people are watching Natasha, you should see the motherfuckers looking for me.”

“Between the two of us we have more combat training and covert skills than probably anyone on the planet,” she says. “I wouldn’t have invited you here if I didn’t think I could handle the risk.”

“I can’t ask that--”

“Mishka,” she says. “You’re not asking. I’m _offering._ Please. I _want_ to help you. Sometimes you can only save yourself, but Mishka. Sometimes you can't even do that. _Let me help you.”_

He swallows, and swallows. Nodding in acceptance is maybe the hardest thing he's done so far. But once he's done it, a weight he didn’t realize he was carrying is suddenly heaved off his shoulders.

 

Yelena brings him home after work. Bucky is still half-expecting some kind of trap. Then, she opens the door and puts a finger to her lips before letting him in. Following her cue, he moves silently. Yelena’s apartment is small, and sparse, but home-like. She doesn’t turn on the lights, just creeps along the hall and beckons him to follow. Warily, he does. At the end of the hall, she gently pushes open a door and peers inside. He looks past and sees…

Bunk beds. Two dark heads, turned away from the door. Bucky’s breath catches. They look like they’re in their teens, maybe, and they’re not Yelena’s, they can’t be. They’re both too dark and too small and too old to be hers, but when he looks at her face…

Yeah. They’re hers.

She closes the door softly.

It’s an extravagant display of trust, but it works on him, like she must have known it would. She grins. “Miruna and Stela,” she says, very quietly, then waves him back down the hall.

“How old are they?” he asks. He follows her into another room: looks like it’s usually a study, but there’s a futon in here, and she reaches under the couch and starts pulling out blankets and a pillow.

“We’re not sure. About 14. I got them out in 2006, when the Red Room fell apart and started dissolving assets.”

“What?” he says, feeling a little gut-punched. “They’re--”

“They’re just kids,” Yelena says, shrugging an idle shoulder. “Miruna wants to play soccer. Stela wants to not have to watch Miruna play soccer. Neither of them want to do their homework, ever. Both of them want to come to my club and steal alcohol. They’re just kids.”

She doesn’t have to tell Bucky what a battle it must have been to get them around to a place where they could be _just kids._

“What if I--”

“I trust you.”

“You shouldn't. I ain't safe.”

“Neither am I. Neither are they.” 

“People are looking for me. _Bad_ people.”

“Bad people are looking for me. Bad people are looking for _them._ What am I going to do? _Not_ live my life? _Not_ help my friends?” She shakes her head. “You can’t let fear run your world, Mishka. Get some rest, huh? You look dead on your feet.”

She shows him where the bathroom is, tells him to help himself to whatever he needs. He nods in gratitude. He feels weighed down. He should check the house, check the locks, but he's so tired. He'll just rest for a second. He takes off his boots and his belt and curls up on the futon and--

 

* * *

 

He sleeps for what feels like a year and wakes to find a small face squinting at him. Dark eyes and a pointed chin. “Mama says we’re to call you Uncle Mishka,” says the girl, in Romanian.

Bucky blinks. “Uh. Yeah,” he responds, in the same language. Because apparently that's a language he speaks. Who knew.

The girl looks highly skeptical. “You don’t look like Mama’s brother.”

“Adopted,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate.

The girl narrows her eyes further. “I don’t believe you.”

Bucky sits up and rubs his face. He sighs. He slept like a rock, but he doesn’t feel any less exhausted. “That’s smart.”

“I think you’re from the Red Room.”

“So’s your Mom.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke? _Your momma.”_

Bucky just squints at her, unsure.

The girl folds her arms. “You don’t talk like you’re from the Red Room.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Your accent is funny.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Miruna!” Yelena calls from the other room. “Let Mishka sleep. Come have breakfast.”

Miruna gives him the kind of critical look that can only come from a girl in her teens. “You should eat something. You’re too skinny.”

Bucky rubs his face. “Yeah, I know.” He’s been losing mass, slowly but steadily, the longer he’s away from Hydra. He’s starting to worry that there was something in the formulas that they used to give him -- something he needs that he isn’t getting.

Miruna sniffs and leaves him.

When he comes out into the main room of the apartment, he finds Miruna watching his every move, and her sister Stela (they must be twins) boredly scrolling through her phone. She looks up only briefly, but her gaze is just as wary-sharp as her sister’s. There’s a fat yellow cat lying in the sunny windowsill. It lifts its head to look at him, then immediately decides that he isn’t even worth observing.

“Hi,” Bucky says, feeling awkward.

At that moment Yelena comes in from the other room, clapping her hands and shouting in Romanian for them to get to school. There’s a whirlwind of activity while Bucky blunders over to the coffee pot and pours himself a mug. It’s cold, and bitter, but when Yelena comes back in, she finds him halfway through.

“There’s cream and sugar, you know,” she says. “Load up enough, it’s a not-totally-awful way to get calories down if you’re having trouble with solids.”

He blinks at her, still feeling sluggish. “What?”

She narrows her eyes. “I assumed you were having trouble…” She trails off before she gets to the word _eating._ “You’re underweight,” she tells him. “You know that, right?”

“I mean. Yeah,” Bucky says. “But it’s… I know what I need to maintain functionality.”

“Functionality?” Yelena repeats. “Yeah, okay, I’m making more eggs. I think we can do a little better than _functionality.”_

 

Half an hour later, the fat yellow cat has moved to lie on Bucky’s boot toes and Bucky is _full._ He hadn’t realized how fucking _hungry_ he was until suddenly he _wasn’t_ anymore. His head feels clearer than it has since he left New York.

Yelena is furrowing her brow at him in a concerned kind of way.

“Thank you,” he mumbles. He feels like an idiot. He just had that **OPERATION PROTOCOL** in his head, and he’d never fucking questioned it. **1500 CALORIES A DAY TO MAINTAIN FUNCTIONALITY,** it said. But 1500 calories a day hadn’t been enough for Steve to do okay so of course that was why he’d been losing weight. Jesus.

“I think you should stay here,” Yelena tells him, bluntly. “For a little while.”

“You got kids, Lenushka.”

“Those kids can and will kick your ass. There’s only one person in this apartment who can’t take care of themselves--”

Bucky runs a hand through his hair, starts pulling it back into a loose bun. “M’fine,” he mumbles. “I can--”

“--and that’s Liho,” Yelena finishes.

Bucky blinks at her again. The cat on his toes goes _mrp?_ And when he looks down, it’s staring sleepily up at him. The rolls of yellow fur have completely covered his feet. It flicks its tail.

“But it’s very telling that you feel the need to get defensive about that,” Yelena says serenely.

“I’ve come a long-ass way from where I started,” he grumbles. “You shoulda seen me when I first got out.” He barely remembers those early days: going through withdrawal in the miserable squat, and riding up to New York in the back of a freezing railcar, and sleepwalking to his and Steve’s old place. There are gaps, places where he just completely zoned out and went on autopilot. There were times when the memories were so all-consuming that he couldn’t function. And of course the annoying blare of his Hydra programming -- now noticeably quieter, fading away slowly but steadily.

“I’m sure you have,” Yelena says.

“Long-ass way to go, yet,” he admits.

“Yeah. I know.”

He looks up and finds the look on her face isn’t pitying at all. She’s not just saying _I know,_ she _means_ it. The Widows had training. Programming. Different from his, but the same in essentials. And now here she is: she’s got a job, an apartment, two kids. A fucking cat.

“How did you get from there to here?” he asks.

She smiles lopsidedly at him. “Did a lot of the shit you’re doing. A few other things. Come on.” She reaches over to the counter, yanks open a rattling junk drawer, and pulls out a notepad with a pen clipped to it.  “Let’s make some lists. Action plans. Get you back on your feet, huh?”

 

* * *

 

With Yelena’s help, Bucky sets himself up in Bucharest as Mihail Georgescu. In many ways, it is the Winter Soldier who chooses the apartment (on the upper floor of Yelena’s apartment building) and “decorates” it. Bucky does put his foot down and refuse to stock every corner of the apartment with munitions and knives. (He’s decided, he reminds himself. He doesn't do that anymore.) But the defensive measures, the positioning of the table, the mattress, the use of cinderblocks, stashing his backpack of notebooks in a strategic location, maintaining some sightlines and obstructing others… That’s all just common sense. Also: if he doesn’t, the hypervigilance keeps him up all night.

Yelena also gets him a job; bouncing part time at her club. He likes it, the simplicity of it, and he's good at it. It's just threat assessment. He's good at threat assessment. One look can tell him if a guy has roofies on him, if he’s already high, if he’s likely to cause trouble. And the violence is so minimal, compared to what he used to do. It’s much more like the violence of his days in Brooklyn, his days with Steve.

He could do it full-time, Yelena tells him, after just a few weeks. She wasn’t certain he’d be able to hold back, to stop from hurting people, but surprisingly that wasn’t a problem. He’d be good at it, could maybe have a career in security work. Sending jerks and drunken idiots on their way -- that’s more Bucky than Winter Soldier, but…

He can’t do it fulltime. He knows. It’s not the violence (which barely registers as violence with him). It’s the environment.

After a few hours of standing with that many people around him, his skin starts to itch. Girls (and sometimes guys) will lay hands on him, flirtatious, trying to get in or get laid, and every time, he freezes inside. Violence is simple. Someone hits him, he hits them back. But this?

 

Once and only once does Yelena talk him into actually _going_ to the club. She remembered that he used to like dancing, and suggested that he try it out. He was cautiously curious.

It doesn’t go well.

He has a drink or two, even though they do nothing for him. A song that he likes starts playing and he decides, it’s now or never.

He’s out on the floor for maybe sixty seconds when someone touches his arm, accidentally. He startles so violently that it sends him crashing into someone else. A girl. She yelps, and he stammers out an apology, and once she gets a good look at him, she smiles and says it’s no big deal and does he want to dance and she puts both hands on his shoulders and steps in close and

everything

goes

pale.

He doesn’t know how else to describe it. He doesn’t quite blank out the way he used to sometimes, but it’s close. It’s like the static between channels, everything going fuzzy and far away. He's caught between  _threat_ and  _not threat_ and the Soldier has no protocols for this, and no protocols means he has to go to the default and the default is  _lash out_ but he can't do that either so it's just--

He doesn’t quite leave the moment, but he ain’t wholly there either. He says something apologetic, makes some excuse, he’s pretty sure, but not totally sure because he doesn’t come back to himself fully until he’s alone in the filthy alley behind the club.

He suddenly becomes aware that his heart is pounding and the next moment he’s doubled over, breathing hard, trying not to be sick.

Jesus. What the fuck. What the actual fucking fuck.

“Alright?”

His head snaps up and he finds Yelena looking down at him, still wearing her dumb little bartending apron.

He nods. Then he shakes his head. Then he shrugs.

She tugs a box over with one toe and sits on it. She smiles at him, sadly. “It was too much for me too, at first. I thought it might be different -- you had all those years before.”

“I remember everything _after_ much better.” Everything before the war feels like a dream. The serum -- or whatever knockoff he’s got -- it enhances the mind, the perception. So everything after Kreichsberg is vivid in his head in a way that Brooklyn sometimes isn't. Of course, near as he can figure, all that enhanced perception just made him more susceptible to programming, subliminal messaging, mind control.

She nods. “It takes time.”

“What does?” he says.

“For touch to feel normal.”

He stares at her.

There’s a thousand memories pushing up inside him all at once: a girl’s hand in his, and the feel of her body against his as they danced, hugging his sisters, his da, his ma, his arm around Steve’s shoulders, pulling him in, bumping their heads--

It’s like the food thing all over again. He feels so _dumb_ but he didn’t even realize how hungry he was. He didn't realize what he was missing. He can’t believe that goddamn Hydra could take something as simple as _human fucking touch_ away from him, but here he is, trying not to puke in an alley because someone touched him with something other than a fist.

He wants to cry and he can't do that either. Jesus. How broken is he? Yelena is looking at him in a way that suggests she's been through the same shitty rodeo, which means that she had been exactly this broken and--

“How did we fucking _function?”_ he asks, astonished. Because seriously. It’s like Hydra had a car, but they took out half the carburetor and one of the wheels. Because why would you need four? you can get by just fine on three. And they were the _best,_ supposedly. They were _wrecks._

Yelena shrugs one shoulder. “We had a mission. We did what we had to do to survive. That's a hell of a motivator.”

He runs a hand over his face.

“Can you get home okay?”

He nods, shaky. It’s not far. He can walk, and it’ll be good to have the cool night air on his face.

 

As he walks, he thinks.

Yelena hardly ever touches him. Same with the girls. He babysits for her sometimes, helps them with their math homework, joins them for dinner pretty regularly. But they don’t touch him, he realizes. Because they know  better. Because of course they do.

It… pisses him off. It _infuriates_ him. This is anger, bubbling hot in his chest. He’s not sure what makes him more angry; the fact that Hydra took this too, or the fact that he’s pretty sure they didn’t mean to. It’s just an unfortunate side effect of what they really wanted from him: obedience. They didn’t treat him like a person because they didn’t want a person. They wanted a dog -- no. They wanted a _weapon._ Weapons don’t crave human contact.

How dare they? _How dare they?_ And worse than that -- how could they be so fucking stupid? They hobbled his ability to function all for the sake of control -- for the sake of keeping him on a leash.

Fuck that noise, he was more leash than dog by the end of it. Christ.

He kicks the corner of a mailbox, once, twice, hard enough that the steel toe of his boot leaves a dent. He doesn’t really feel better.

 

Later, lying in his shitty little apartment, on the mattress and in the sleeping bag, he stares at the stained ceiling and feels conscious of his body in a way he hasn’t, not since he woke up.

He’s a mess, he knows. He’s read his own user manual. It’s a mess in there. Bracing for the Arm, and the wires that hook into his spine, into his nervous system. The Arm itself -- it’s a part of him now, but it’s not really good for him, he knows. It's always leeching the heat out of him, or overheating and scalding him. It cuts into him. It pulls him sideways, puts strain on his spine. It’s not so bad now that he’s put on some more weight and muscle. He's got a thousand little aches and pains, but they're easily ignorable. He just dials them out, most of the time. His spine twinges constantly, and the muscles of his shoulders are always stiff, and his ribs kind of hurt every time he takes a deep breath. The whole left side of him is stabbed through with metal. The Arm would pull him apart, otherwise. It's always been like that. It's just the way he is; with his old aches, and his bad back, and his Arm, but... 

He’s suddenly _aware_ of it in a way he hadn’t been before, and he’s aware that it’s not… pretty. The mess of scar tissue, the metal digging into his skin like some kind of futuristic parasite. Even putting all that aside, the way he looks now ain’t exactly a look that Bucky-Then would have gone for. Bucky-Then was slim, svelte, lean. He was a dancer and a welterweight. He cared what he looked like. Bucky-Now looks like someone that Bucky-Then would have wanted to keep Steve safe from. He’s built like a tank. He’s built like a goddamn _Landkeuzer P. 1000_.

But that woman today. The way she looked up at him after he bumped into her. As if she liked what she saw. And then she'd pressed in --

 _\--close and kisses him hard, teeth and tongue and Jesus, Bucky respects a gal who knows what she wants. She pushes him back in his seat and just swings her leg up and over. He can feel the heat of her through his trousers, and he can feel his body responding. Yes._ Yes. _Fingers close--_

 _\--on his wrist and tug him along. “Come on,” the guy says. “I know a spot.” It's quiet on the streets, hardly anyone left in the city since the occupation, and certainly not many dames. But they're marching out tomorrow and Bucky feels the urgency of that under his skin. He wants to feel close to someone, wants to feel_ alive. _The guy’s hand is big and warm on his wrist and Bucky feels his heart beat a little faster. He hasn't fooled around with another guy in years. It’s--_

 _“--no worse than jerking off, right?” says James. The other James. He puts his hand on Bucky's chest and looks up at him. He smiles. This James is a real troublemaker. There's about eight Jameses on this block alone but Jamie Boyle has blond hair and thin wrists and Bucky knows it ain't gonna be at all like jerking off because instead of just_ thinking _about Steve, he's gonna--_

_“--try again another time,” Dorothy is saying and Bucky can tell she thinks it's her fault. He doesn't know how to tell her that it's him, it's his fucking hangups and he’d be more humiliated but it ain’t like this is the first time, and he knows how to treat a lady._

_“Now c'mon Dot,” Bucky says, stepping close again, hands on her hips and she sucks in a breath. “Just because I’m a little tired--” he ain’t, but she doesn’t need to know that “--don’t mean I can't still show you a good time.” And then he drops to his knees and slides her skirt up and leans in--_

\--close. The memories come thick and fast in his head, rolling over him like waves on a beach. Hands. Mouths. Noises. _Jesus._

The floodgates are fucking open, it seems. Holy hell.

There’s guilt too, he realizes. A sick twist of fear that had belonged to Bucky-Then. He’s on his knees, in an alley, with a man, and feeling sick to his stomach about how much he likes this. He’s lying in bed next to little Stevie, listening to the rattle of his snores and aching with want, and guilt for wanting. Bucky-Now regards all this with a kind of fond bemusement. _Jesus. The things you think are important when you’re young._

He stares at the stains on his ceiling and feels--

\--not much at all to be honest. He's just tired, and achey, and old. He seems to have hit some internal barrier. He’s peering in at the things Bucky-Then liked to do, but he can’t really feel it. Bucky-then might have craved that -- the warmth, the heat of it, that sensation of connection. But Bucky-now?

He’s not hard; there’s no pooling arousal, no burning desire. He’s still angry (always) but it’s indignant more than anything. He’s offended that this too has been taken from him. He feels like an idiot for not noticing sooner. 

It’s not that he wasn’t _missing sex_ , he supposes. He’s been frustrated and tense. But it was like the hunger; he didn’t notice it. It was background noise that he didn’t realize was there. Partially because the aches and pains that plague him make it a little difficult to focus on feeling good. There’s too much mess in his head, in his body. He doesn’t think for a second that getting laid right now would be a good idea. He doesn’t even _want_ to have sex, not _really._

But…

There’s an overlay of memories in his head: so many different times they’ve blurred together. It’s just the feeling of skin against his skin, cooling in the moments after. Legs tangled together, arms wrapped around bodies, hands curled around curves. He remembers cuddling in behind, pressing his face into the soft skin of someone's nape. Having his arms around someone, and just... being there. No heat, no urgency, just that feeling of being satisfied. Sleepy and safe and comfortable. Afterglow. 

That, he misses. He wonders if there would be a way for him to somehow skip over the sex and go straight to that sleepy place of resting afterwards. That place of peace and satisfaction and calm.

He thinks of a fire escape. Sticky heat, and the sun on his skin. A sound in his ears. Glenn Miller and the _scritch-scratch-scritch_ of Steve’s pencil. He is tired. He is resting. There is peace.

He rolls out of bed and grabs his notebook off the table where he left it. He finds the entry. It’s soothing, to see it written down. They didn’t take that, and now they can’t, because it’s right there, written down.

That entry is well-thumbed. He’d drawn a little box around it and folded down the corner so he can find it easily on a bad day. It’s not the most ecstatically happy of memories, but the warm contentment of it is completely un-fucking-paralleled in his whole broken menagerie of shattered recollections. It’s an ember that he can always use to light a fire and warm himself.

He lies back down, props his head up with his flesh arm and balances the notebook on his chest, reading over the entry, letting the memory wash over him. Soothing.

Sometimes, vaguely, he thinks it would be nice to recreate that memory. It seems like an achievable goal, almost. On sunny summer days, he can get close by lying out on the roof here in Bucharest, but the building isn’t secure enough for him to feel comfortable exposing the Arm like that. But maybe, he thinks, someday. Maybe someday there will be a place secure enough for that. Maybe Steve will be there with a sketchbook, and the city will be enough like New York for him to close his eyes and fool himself.

Maybe not though, because Steve is still a handler, and Bucky isn’t sure he wants one of those ever again. And he doesn’t think he’d ever be comfortable sleeping in front of one, and more than anything, he wants that: to sleep in the sun and feel safe.

He reads the again. Again. Again. Eventually, the words blur and he drifts off to sleep with the notebook on his chest, as comforting as a stuffed animal.

 

* * *

 

What the support groups call “self-care” isn’t as flagrantly available in Bucharest as it had been in New York, but Bucky’s idea of self care doesn’t really involve nice-smelling lotion or whatever the fuck a “bath bomb” is (sounds terrible). His idea of luxury is based on James Buchanan Barnes’s idea of luxury: fresh fruit, a big steak, the greasiest burger imaginable, a new record, a night at a jazz club, good whiskey.

Some of those things are off the list now. Whiskey is out of the question -- he’d have to drink gallons of the stuff before it had an impact on his enhanced metabolism, but even the thought of giving in to any kind of impairment makes him feel vaguely ill.

And obviously, a night out at any kind of club is not something he enjoys anymore.

But he does treat himself to music as often as he likes, and soon his phone is packed with a mishmash of genres, old and new, popular and obscure, good and bad. He doesn’t have strong opinions about music except that _he loves it._ All of it. Doesn’t seem to matter what genre it is, or how fast or slow, he just wants to shove it in his brain, as fast and as much as he can. He fucking loves music.

James Buchanan Barnes had been as vain as a peacock, a sucker for a sharp suit, and always taking the time to slick his hair back like a swell. The Winter Soldier had been more accustomed to a perfunctory hose-down and the odd shave/haircut. His clothes had been brutal, protective, utilitarian. Bucky is, as he is in all other things, a compromise between those two instincts. He is not interested in being handsome any more than he is interested in hosing himself off with ice-cold water.

Bucky likes layers. They remind him of that feeling of safety and purpose that came with wearing the tac gear. He layers jackets upon hoodies upon long sleeves upon tee-shirts, and revels in how warm he feels.

He has a memory that he treasures, of running a hairbrush through a little girl’s hair a hundred times, counting the strokes. His hair isn’t as long as hers was, but counting the strokes of the brush still brings him a weird sense of peace. Stillness.

One day, Stela sits behind him and braids it, her deft little fingers separating and gently tugging. He only blanks out a little, and the buzzing under his skin is more like a purr than a hive of bees.

He learns how to make an acceptable dinner of steak and potatoes and invites Yelena and the girls up, as a thank you for all their help. He still babysits, sometimes, and it’s not uncommon for him to be in the middle of doing something when a knock on the door announces that either Miruna or Stela is there, wanting help with their math homework, or a history project. They like to ask him, teasingly, for help with essays about World War II and the Cold War. They play innocent. They are very good at it.

To be fair: he does know a lot about World War II, and the Cold War. And he likes having them around. They don’t mind that his apartment is bare, and there’s something so soothing about having them in it.

The music and the steak dinners and helping the girls with their homework -- that’s all 100% James Buchanan Barnes. But there are things that he does that are 100% Winter Soldier too, and one of those things is caring for the Arm.

Bucky knows that the Arm was never meant to be a part of him. He knows that he didn't ask for it -- didn't want it. The Arm is an intrusion and a violation. It has no business existing.

But then, James Buchanan Barnes has no business existing in Bucharest in 2015.

Every morning he does calibration and diagnostics, just like they used to do when he was fresh out of cryo. He does the strength training that helps him carry the Arm’s weight. He sits in the sun to warm up -- it’s constantly leeching body heat from him, and sometimes he stands with the Arm in the freezer to cool off when it starts to overheat (even though proximity to that kind of cold makes him grind his teeth). Once, he put his freshly chilled metal fingers on the back of Stela’s neck. She squealed and punched him, reflexively, while Miruna cackled.

In the evenings, after dinner, he locks the doors, bars the windows, and unrolls his makeshift tune-up and cleaning kit. “Alright, Sweetheart,” he says to the Arm, and then flares the plates so he can get down in there with his soft toothbrush to clean the inner workings. He tightens the fittings that keep it anchored into place, checks for damage, for wear and tear. He polishes the plates to a shine and thinks about whether there’s a way to get the star off, or paint over it, or something. He’s not totally sure he wants to, but it’s an idea that he toys with sometimes.

The Arm runs little calibration loops, purring from shoulder to fingertip and back. The Arm hums quietly in the night, ticking into sleep/recharge mode. The Arm is learning fine control -- it was not designed to be anything other than a weapon, a blunt instrument, a rock-solid base for a sniper rifle. Now he uses it for other things: to write in his notebooks, to make repairs to his secondhand furnishings and clothes, to lift boxes for Yelena, to type delicately on the refurbished laptop that he keeps.

He thinks that the Arm likes being used for these small, precise, gentle tasks. It hums rather than screeching, it purrs rather than making those eerie metal-ratcheting sounds that grate against his bones. He knows that the Arm is a machine, and should be incapable of _like_ and _dislike,_  but then, so is he.

 

* * *

  

On May 6th, 2015, Bucky wakes up to a hand pounding flat against his door. He’s halfway out the window before he registers that there’s a voice too. A voice he knows.

Miruna.

“Mishka!” she shouts. “Come on, I know you’re in there.”

He climbs back in through the window and stumbles to the door. He pulls it open and scans the stairwell behind Miruna before even looking at her face. She’s just celebrated her fifteenth birthday, and she’s even more of a pain in the ass than she was last year, but he loves the crap out of her.

She gives him an almost cartoonishly teenagery face. “Mom says you can watch it on our TV.”

Bucky rubs one eye and gives a yawn so huge his jaw creaks. “Watch what?”

Miruna rolls her eyes. “The Avengers are fighting robots in Sokovia,” she says, and turns away, leaving Bucky staring at empty air.

The Avengers.

_Steve._

Some deep seated instinct has him stumbling after her, something near his hindbrain urging him to _follow_ because _Steve is in trouble._ It’s like he’s going to step out the door and it’ll be 1940, and Steve will be there, skinny and with a black eye, fists raised like he doesn’t need to be saved, but he does. He does.

But there’s no 1940s. There are no bullies and no Skinny Punkass Steve. There’s just Yelena, her eyes darting up to his face when he comes in after Miruna. “Mishka.” She looks like --

She looks just like the nurse who told Steve that his mother wasn’t going to come back from the hospital. Not this time.

Bucky stumbles in, suddenly feeling numb in every limb. He feels like he’s standing just over his own right shoulder as he comes around behind the couch, to look at their little TV, where shaky news footage is showing--

“--a huge portion of the city is being raised up,” the anchorman is saying in Romanian, sounding shaken. “They’re at 2000 meters, we estimate.”

A huge chunk of the city is -- fucking levitating. Heaving itself into the air like a rocket and still rising. Even in the unsteady footage, Bucky can see the blue blaze of the engines or whatever the fuck is making it go up and up and up.

“Tell me he isn’t on that,” Bucky says.

“Mishka…” Yelena’s voice is gentle.

Bucky’s voice is shaking. “You tell me he isn’t--”

“He’s gotten out of worse fixes than this,” Yelena says, firm like a building foundation. “And he’s done it without your help. They’ve got each other, haven’t they?”

For a moment, Bucky doesn’t understand what she means by that, but then--

_Natasha._

Bucky’s fists close on the back of the couch and the stuffing and wood creaks under his grip. God. Natasha is up there too. 

“Come here,” Yelena says. “Sit down. You want to watch?”

Miruna and Stela are watching him with their wary eyes. He uncurls his fingers and sits on the floor in front of the sofa, cross legged, hands clasped in front of him, thumbs rubbing absently. His Arm is humming; a soft high whine that he can’t stop hearing over the news anchors.

They keep playing this footage, cutting between the steady rise of the city, the anxious speculation of experts -- as if there could be experts in something like _this --_ and images from earlier in the day, that moment when the fight changed, when that huge central chunk of the city lifted off.

They keep showing shaky phone footage: someone recording as a bridge splits, right down the middle. Half of it rises, up and up, dropping broken concrete and torn girders. The footage jerks, trying to keep the bridge in view, and a figure is just visible there, standing on the broken end.

A figure in red, white, and blue. He gets smaller and smaller as the city lifts up and away.

They cut back to the experts. Bucky watches, and makes himself be still. He’s good at that: making himself be still. He’s had plenty of practice.

It takes him ages to realize that Stela is braiding his hair again, absently twining the strands, and then pulling them loose, and then winding them together again.

They keep watching.

 

The city goes up. The city comes down in pieces.

And for an hour -- _an hour --_ there is no confirmation of casualties.

Bucky is still. Bucky is so, so still. Bucky is like a block of ice.

Helpless isn’t the word for how he feels. There isn’t a word for how he feels, not in any language he knows of.

But once, long ago, he looked at Steve across a lake of fire and watched -- unable to do anything _but_ watch as Steve bent the bars back and got as much of a running start as he could and made that face, that _I can’t believe I’m going to try this_ face, and then--

It would be one thing, if he had been the one making the jump. It was infinitely worse to watch.

This feels like that. Hope in his throat, terror in his guts, cold through his limbs, and flames all around, ready to swallow him up. He knows the feeling, even if he doesn’t have a name for it. He’s felt it on battlefields and Brooklyn alleys. He’s had it while looking through a scope and now he has it, watching through a television set.

Something resets in his brain and he thinks…

Steve isn’t his handler.

A sound comes out of him. Very small, very broken.

“The Avengers have just released a statement,” the anchor announces. Bucky’s Arm kicks into a higher ratcheting gear, a strange angry sound like it’s powering up for a fight. Stela doesn’t even flinch as she continues undoing the braid she’s been working on. “They are confirming that there is one casualty from their team--” a seam at Bucky’s shoulder pops when the armplates flare and ripple without his say-so “--a recent recruit from Sokovia named Pietro Maximoff.”

The Arm whines and Bucky jerks into motion. In one fluid, animal movement, he’s on his feet. His hair is still falling out of its braid as he leaves Yelena’s apartment. He doesn’t say anything, and they let him go. He takes the stairs at a run, all the way up to his apartment, closes and locks the door behind him, throws his back against it.

Steve’s alive.

_Steve’s alive._

“Oh fuck,” he says aloud, to his empty apartment. It hits him like a ton of bricks. All of it, in one go. Steve could’ve died today, and Bucky wasn’t there to help him, and Steve could’ve died _because_ Bucky wasn’t there to help him. Jesus.

Because Steve isn’t his handler.

He is _Steve’s_ handler.

Well. “Handler.” You _handle_ Steve the same way you handle a tornado. Stand back and watch helplessly. Pick up the pieces after. But the revelation lands like a physical blow, like a cartoon anvil falling on his head.

The Arm starts running calibration loops. He times his breathing to it. The panic resolves into something that isn’t calm, not quite, but is _something._

He can’t be Steve’s handler. He can’t do that anymore. He has his hands full taking care of his own issues, making his own decisions. He can just about manage to babysit the girls sometimes. But Steve needs more looking after than that, and Bucky’s a mess. He can’t be Steve’s handler any more than he could let Steve be his.

It makes him unspeakably fucking sad to think it. He lies down in the sunlight that filters through the newspapers for a minute and lets himself warm up, lets the panic drain from him, leaving him feeling raw and shaky. He is still hyper alert, intensely aware of all his surroundings, but he can think through the haze now.

It’s okay that he was Steve’s handler, and he can’t do that anymore. It’s okay. He doesn’t kill people anymore either. He can find something new to do. Something small, and peaceful, and amazing all at once. He’ll babysit, and work at the club, and go to the market. He’ll smile at people, and use the Arm for small, harmless things: petting dogs and testing the ripeness of fresh fruit, and writing in his journals.

It’s okay, he thinks. Steve’s alive, and Bucky’s alive, and every small, peaceful thing he does will be a huge _FUCK YOU, HYDRA_ in bright red letters, twelve feet tall.

That makes him smile. And finally, he can get off the floor, and get back to it; the business of being alive, of finding peace.

 

* * *

 

Naturally, the peace doesn’t last. Peace never does.

 

* * *

 

_You know who I am?_

_You’re Steve._

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering what a Landkreuzer P. 1000 is, it was a tank that the Germans designed but never built, because there were no bridges strong enough to carry it, and no tunnels wide enough for it to drive through, and no planes big enough to lift it. And any road it might have driven on would have been instantly destroyed by its treads.
> 
> This is the tank that I think of whenever I describe Post-WS Bucky as being tank-like.
> 
> I have missed you guys, and I have missed this fic! I am so glad to be back! I'm going to be at a family reunion for the next two weeks and I don't know if I'll be able to post while I'm there. But I will try, and I'm back on the 19th either way, so at the very latest you can expect the next update around then.
> 
> <3<3<3


	5. Since You Saw Me Last

##  [5: I’m Not the Same Man](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6g0i0JC6FE)

No more alarms  
I've got this, I've got this, I've got this  
No fire escape  
I've got this, I've got this, I've got this  
We've got this

I'm not the same man  
**since you saw me last**  
I’m not the same man.  
\- by Greg Laswell, 2016.

 

* * *

 

_This doesn’t have to end in a fight, Buck._

_It always ends in a fight._

_You pulled me from the river. Why?_

_I don’t know._

_Yes, you do._

 

* * *

 

“Buck, stop!” 

Bucky twists under the hold, bringing his metal arm between him and his opponent -- but it’s not an opponent, it’s _Steve_  and Steve’s face is right there, eyes wide in the cowl.

“You’re gonna kill someone!”

Bucky slams Steve to the ground. He feels the Arm whine at the use as he puts his fist through the floor next to Steve’s head. Steve flinches away, hand raised to protect himself, and that hits Bucky close to where he lives -- or it _would_ if he wasn’t so _pissed off._

“I’m not gonna kill anyone.” He straightens up and he throws the bag without needing to look. That’s it; escape route chosen. Now he just has to get there and get away.

But then there’s another guy coming in through the window, gun raised. Bucky lifts his Arm, ducks behind it as the bullets ping off the metal and--

And then Steve is there. Steve’s arm curls around his back, and Bucky puts his flesh arm around Steve’s automatically. They’re tucked in close, behind the shell of the shield. It’s all bullets and ringing and hot, close air. Bucky is encased in a little cocoon of Steve and vibranium. For the first time in what may well be years, something shrill and panicked in his brain stem stops frantically trying to tear him apart. The buzzing under his skin goes very quiet, like it’s listening.

And then the other guy comes in the window and Bucky throws the weapon nearest to hand. It happens to be Steve.

 

* * *

 

_Congratulations, Cap. You’re a criminal._

 

* * *

 

It’s not that Bucky is bitter.

He _is,_ of course. Just not about _this._

He’s bitter that he’s being arrested for something -- possibly the _one thing in his entire shitshow existence_ \-- that he _didn’t_ do. He’s bitter that he didn’t get to say goodbye to Yelena and the girls. He’s bitter that Steve came charging in and trashed his chance of getting away clean.

He’s bitter about this glass cage. God is he bitter. Because once upon a time, he might have liked it (fucked up as that sounds.) But seriously. A clear cage? Where he could see out, see everything around him, and at the same time know that everyone was safe from him and no one would accidentally touch him? Delightful. At any other time, he’d chill out in here. Maybe take a nap.

But now?

God, it’s not a simple feeling, but he just got Steve back. _He just got Steve back._ And now they’re separated, again. They should be snapping together like magnets. They should be shoulder to shoulder, side by side. Instead, they can only catch each other’s gaze briefly. Through a crowd. Through reinforced glass. The wrongness of it is like a badly set bone.

So hell yeah he’s bitter. He’s as bitter as he is exhausted, but it’s not about that, right now. He could break out of these restraints, probably. If he put his back into it. He could claw his way free and smash his way out and take out the guards.

But he won’t.

And that, he’s not bitter about. Choosing the non-violent option is about the only thing in his godforsaken life that he _doesn’t_ feel bitter about.

 

* * *

 

_Желание._

_No._

_Ржавый._

_Stop._

_Семнадцать._

_Stop!_

_Рассвет. Печь. Девять. Добросердечный._ _  
_ _Возвращение на родину. Один. Грузовой вагон._

_Солдат?_

_Я готов отвечать._

* * *

 

Neutralize targets. (no)

Return to the Siberia base. (no. _No.)_

The commands are simple. He should be able to do this. The body is healthy -- healthier than he expects it to be. He is strong. The Arm is in good repair. This should be simple.

But this Target. (He’s not-- he’s not a _target,_ he’s not a _mission,_ he’s--)

This Target (Steve) is _troublesome._ He threw the Target down a fucking _elevator shaft_ (Oh God, Steve, I didn’t mean it, God help me) but here he fucking is, bursting out onto the rooftop with an expression like the Soldier is stealing his baby (fuck -- me too, pal, don’t let him take me outta here -- I don’t want -- I don’t want to go back) and then he’s sprinting across the rooftop and there’s a thump somewhere below and the helicopter veers wildly. The Soldier steadies the controls and looks out to see what kind of fuckery the Target is up to now. (Steve?) Is he--

_Holding the fucking helicopter?_

_With his bare goddamn hands?_

_(What the fuck!?)_

The sight of the Target straining to keep the helicopter in place fills the Soldier with rage. It’s so -- so _stupid._ Any normal human would be ripped in half by this, would dislocate every joint in their body and _has the target tried this before? Is that how he knew it would work?_ Or was he just fucking _hoping_ it would work and he got _fucking lucky?_ The rage The Soldier feels is possibly out of proportion with the situation but oh he wants to _hit something._

Crashing the helicopter seems like the most efficient way to achieve that end goal.

 

* * *

 

 _Just like that we’re supposed_ _  
_ _to be cool?_

_What did I do?_

_Enough._

 

* * *

 

After they’ve decided and Sam made a call to someone called Scott, Bucky keeps watch, hidden in the shadows of an alley, while Steve boosts a Volkswagen. In the background, he can hear Sam going “oooh if the American public could see you now,” and Steve shooting back: “how they would clutch their pearls.” And they laugh.

Bucky kind of wants to --

To interrupt somehow. He wants to cut in, He wants to slide in like he used to in dancehalls, a million years ago. He could say _the American public doesn’t know Steve Rogers real well, do they?_ Or something. Something about Nazi Germany, maybe. Something about… just  _something._ He could steal Steve’s attention away, with just a few well-placed words. He’s not sure exactly what they are, but they’re sitting on the edge of his tongue, eager to be spoken, but the urge behind it is selfish. Catty. He knows it. So he keeps his mouth shut. He doesn’t have a part in this dance. Not anymore.

Everything is upside down and backwards. Or -- everything has been set right, hasn’t it? He’s with Steve, on the run from bullies. So everything’s been set to rights. It’s him that’s upside down and backwards.

“Buck?”

Bucky looks around and sees Steve standing a few steps away, leaning to one side, just a bit. Listing, off-balance, his face still underwritten with all that painful hope. “Time to go.” He says it like he’s sure, but his face is a question. A plea.

Bucky nods and steps back from his post, moving silently.

“You okay?” Steve asks, so quietly it’s almost inaudible. He doesn’t want Sam to hear.

“Fine,” Bucky says, biting back the urge to report in Russian. “Tired.”

“Maybe you can catch a few winks in the back seat?”

Bucky stares at Steve. Has he lost his damn mind? “It’s a clown car, Rogers.” He waves at himself, the _bulk_ of him. He’ll be lucky if he even fits back there.

About 18 expressions cross Rogers’ dumb face. Jesus. It’s like flashing neon signs. The guy’s got a poker face like freshly cleaned glass. Obviously he likes being called _Rogers,_ possibly specifically in the context of being bawled out by Bucky Barnes. But he also looks sheepish and that’s probably on account of the fact that he’s Captain America, and ought to be able to do that kind of basic geometry. And his eyes settle on the breadth of Bucky's torso and huh. That's interesting.

But then his face settles on “sad” like a car slipping into park and just. Stays there.

“What?” Bucky says, a little waspish.

“Nothing.” Steve lifts his chin a little and drags his expression from “sad” to “stubborn.”

Bucky narrows his eyes.

Steve’s mouth twitches down on one side.

Bucky hones his gaze into the kind of laser that can melt steel.

Steve cracks. He looks away first. “You used to be able to sleep anywhere,” he mumbles, reluctant.

 _Fuck._ They exchange a look. Steve looks apologetic, like he’s sorry to have mentioned it, and Bucky feels like shit for all the ways he probably doesn’t measure up to Steve’s memories of him. He’s not the Bucky he was back then. Bucky swallows. “A lotta things changed, Steve.”

Steve’s face settles back into park at Sad. “Yeah,” he says, a little hoarse.

“Time’s a-wastin’, Grandpas,” Sam says, from the other side of the Volkswagen.

 

They pile into the clown car.

Well. Sort of.

Sam gets into the driver’s seat. Steve and Bucky kind of compress themselves into the back, curled into two little balls of supersoldier, facing each other with their heads curled down and their knees nearly bumping. Then Sam covers them with a blanket that smells like wet dog. A little light filters in through the weave of the scratchy blanket, but it’s enough to see each other by.

The car lurches forward, its little engine puttering to life.

Bucky can tell that Steve’s trying not to stare. But to be fair, he doesn’t have much choice. There’s nothing else to look at. Frankly, there isn’t room for one supersoldier in this glorified golf cart, much less two. This is the closest they’ve been since the helicarrier, probably. Since Bucky was bashing Steve’s face in with his metal arm. Since Bucky remembered who he was. Who they both were.

Steve looks down. He’s still got those long lashes like a girl. Christ. Okay so maybe Bucky is staring too. So fucking sue him. It’s just that the buzzing under his skin is back. The frantic screeching thing is tugging at his brain stem even harder than usual, wanting him to do... something. He’s not sure what. It’s like there are alarms going off all over the inside of his head, but Bucky doesn’t know what they _mean._  

“Just until we’re out of the city,” Steve says into the dark, smelly, stifling air between them. “Traffic cams and stuff.”

Bucky makes an affirmative sounding grunt.

Silence.

They used to be able to sit together in silence comfortably, just breathing and relaxing, comfortable in the quiet and companionship.

This ain’t that.

“Everything’s on camera these days,” Steve says quietly. “You know?”

Bucky stares at him, and wonders if Steve is being deliberately stupid, or if he’s somehow forgotten that Bucky was a _spy and an assassin_ for the last seventy years. “Yeah, Steve. I know.”

There’s an aborted sound from outside the blankets, like Sam stifling the urge to either laugh or say something. Maybe snort.

“Right,” Steve says. He looks like he wants to fidget but they are strictly forbidden from fidgeting, since bags of groceries don’t fidget and that’s what they’re supposed to be.

It occurs to Bucky, far too late, that Steve asking about the cameras was an attempt to start conversation about how things are different now. _Hey pal, you ever miss hats as much as I do? How come no one wears hats anymore, huh?_

Stupid. _Stupid._ He should have--

“Have you--”

Bucky looks up and finds Steve staring again. Searching.

“Have I what?” Bucky prompts, because there’s a million possible endings to that sentence. Most of them are awful.

“Have you been doing okay?” Steve asks at last. “You’ve been… Two years, Buck. Have you been okay?”

Bucky blinks at him. “ _I_ didn’t drop a small Slavic city out of the sky.”

Steve winces. Sam makes that sound again. It’s a little angry sounding, maybe. What the fuck is _his_ problem?

“But you’ve been okay?” Steve presses, in his bullheaded way. He’s got mission focus on. He won’t stop till he gets answers. “You look better than -- than the last time I saw ya.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Yeah, pal. I been eating my vegetables and scrubbing behind my ears, okay?” He mumbles. “I’m fine.”

“Good,” Steve says, sounding -- pained. A little. “That’s. That’s good, Buck.”

Bucky studies him, and tries to work out why the fuck Steve looks like he’s got a bullet in his side that he’s keeping mum about. He doesn’t _actually_ have a bullet in his side that he’s keeping mum about, does he? “You?” He asks. Steve gets a deer-in-headlights look. That wasn’t enough words, was it. Bucky should say more. The words are there, somewhere in his brain, behind his teeth, but he can’t seem to get them out. Awkwardly, he says: “I mean. Two years. You been okay?”

“Aside from dropping small Slavic cities outta the sky?” Steve answers, quick as a whip. Too quick. “Yeah. I’ve been fine.”

Sam makes another sound. A decidedly angry sound. A scoff, in fact.

Steve closes his eyes, briefly, and visibly decides to ignore Sam’s non-verbal commentary. He looks like he's praying Bucky will too.

Steve hasn’t been okay.

Bucky feels sick all of a sudden. Steve hasn’t been okay and Bucky wasn’t there to fix it, wasn’t there to help. Maybe he was the _reason_ Steve wasn’t okay.

Oh who the fuck is he kidding. He’s _definitely_ the reason Steve wasn’t okay. Or he’s a part of it at least. Probably not all of it, because Steve’s never been okay, not once the entire time Bucky knew him. Jesus.

“What have you. Been up to?” Bucky asks, halting and slow.

Steve gets this comically startled look, like he just got called on in math class while he was doodling in the margins. “Um.”

Bucky narrows his eyes, suddenly suspicious.

“Oh,” Steve says, and starts to shrug before remembering that he’s supposed to be a bag of groceries. “Keeping busy.”

“With what?” Bucky asks.

Steve doesn’t shrug this time, but he sure looks like he wants to. “Work stuff. Captain America stuff.”

“And?”

Steve doesn’t answer.

“You still drawing?” Bucky asks.

Steve’s eyes latch onto his face. “You remember that?” He asks. And Bucky knows it’s coming, he knows. His fingers close a little tighter on his knees in anticipation and then the words are coming out of Steve’s mouth, eager: “What else do you remember?”

Bucky tries, valiantly, not to flinch. He looks away. The truth is he’s got it all back. He’s pretty sure. He doesn’t know it all, not all the time. He _can’t._ It’s too much for his half-cooked brain to hold all the time, but it’s all there. It’s just that half of it got misfiled and the card catalog got shuffled like a deck of cards. He’s been trying to sort through, that’s what the notebooks--

The notebooks.

Fuck.

Bucky’s eyes slam shut.

“Bucky?” Steve sounds worried. “What is it?” Captain America is shading in at the edges. Must be a knee-jerk stress response for Steve at this point.

“My go bag,” Bucky says.

“Your… The one you had under the floorboards?”

“Yeah.”

“What about it?”

Bucky sighs. “Had some stuff in it,” he mumbles.

“What… kind of stuff?” Steve asks, sounding wary now.

Bucky opens his eyes and finds Steve staring at him, looking concerned, and a little suspicious, and kind of like he hates himself for being suspicious. Bucky doesn’t think he could put that many emotions on his face if he was trying.

Bucky doesn’t want to tell Steve this shit. “Nothing.” He closes his eyes. Steve should know this stuff, in case -- it might be important. “Just. Personal stuff. Journals. Been taking notes. What I remember.”

“Oh,” Steve says. Then, darker, quieter. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

If all of Bucky’s memories were about his time with Steve, that would be one thing. It’s clear that Steve’s priority is whether Bucky remembers Bucky-Before. And yeah, in a lot of ways, that’s the more important Bucky. Twenty-seven years of memories. All the formative ones. All the best ones. All the Steve ones. He’s got all that, or as much as he’s ever going to get, he figures.

But it’s the seven/seventy years in between that are the real concern. Those are the years that matter to everyone else. The world doesn’t care that Bucky had a gap in his teeth when he was six, and he could whistle the entirety of _Tiger Rag._ They don’t care about that whistling, gap-toothed kid. They _do_ care about that time he shot down a plane with two presidents on it. That’s all they’re gonna see. 

Most people only see the monster. Steve only sees the kid. But here’s the thing: the kid and the monster are one person.

Steve considers this -- or Bucky assumes he does. He keeps his eyes closed. The exhaustion is back: a heaviness settling all over him like a lead blanket.

“Anything incriminating?” Steve asks, cautiously neutral.

“I knew you were gonna fucking ask that,” Bucky grumbles.

“I’m sorry, I just--“

“I don’t care that it’s _incriminating,”_ Bucky says, voice coming out like metal dragged over gravel.

Steve makes an indignant sound. “What do you mean, you don’t--”

“I _killed people,_ Steve. I killed people and their families never got answers. I don’t care that they know what I did for Hydra. I’m _glad_ they know what I did for Hydra--”

“ _You_ didn’t do--” Steve’s trying to build up a head of steam about this, and once he does, there’ll be no stopping him. Bucky needs to head him off at the proverbial pass here.

“It’s the rest of it, Steve,” he says, maybe too loudly. He makes himself lower his voice. “They’re fucking _diaries,_ alright? It’s _humiliating._ So just -- just leave it. Please.”

Steve closes his mouth.

“Hate to interrupt,” Sam says. It doesn’t sound like he does hate it. “But we’re out of the city if you want to stop being the chattiest bags of groceries I’ve ever purchased.”

Bucky tugs the blanket off them both and avoids Steve’s eye.

Sam pulls over so Steve can take the driver’s seat because apparently they’re meeting Sharon (whoever the fuck Sharon is) and Steve knows where the rendezvous is supposed to be. Bucky takes the back seat, partially because he’s the most wanted fugitive here, partially because his brain really wants to have the option of bashing out the back window to fire at a pursuing vehicle, and partially because if he sits back here, he gets the whole seat to himself. He doesn’t want to risk anyone bumping shoulders with him, in case he has some kind of internal meltdown. It had been bad enough when the cops manhandled him.

Steve seems to have gotten the message that Bucky doesn’t much want to talk, because he just focuses on the road and doesn’t try to ask anymore questions about what Bucky does or doesn’t remember. Bucky doesn’t want to admit that he remembers all of it (more or less) because Steve will take that to mean that Bucky is the same old Bucky he always was and that isn’t the fucking case anymore.

But it’s possible that Steve isn’t talking because Sam has been giving him the stink eye for the last twenty minutes.

The silence is. Pretty awkward.

“This Sharon person. You trust her?” Bucky asks at long last. There’s a part of his brain screeching angrily, wanting to know.

Steve’s fingers tighten on the wheel. “Yeah,” he says.

“She an Avenger?” Bucky doesn’t remember a Sharon on the Avengers, but maybe she’s new. 

“Not… She’s CIA. Part of the task force. But she’s. An old friend.”

“An old friend,” Bucky repeats.

The back of Steve’s neck is starting to go pink.

“Sharon Carter,” Sam breaks in. “You know. Peggy Carter’s niece.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, and shuts his damn mouth.

“Yeah, fucking _oh,”_ Sam says.

“Sam,” Steve says, very quietly.

“Nah, man, that ain’t the _oh_ of someone who’s surprised.” Sam twists around in his seat and looks back at Bucky. “You been keeping tabs, right?”

It’s easier to say nothing, so Bucky says nothing. But no answer is answer enough for Wilson.

“Yeah, you been keeping tabs. She was your friend too, right?”

Bucky’s face settles into dead-eyed blankness. He knows it. He lets it happen. Yeah, Peggy had been his friend too. She was a hell of a dame, deserved to go out in a firefight -- that was the way she woulda wanted it. He’s glad she got to live her life and all, but--

“You don’t come to the funeral. You don’t send flowers. You don’t text, you don’t call, you--”

“Come on, Sam,” Steve says, since Bucky’s not speaking up to defend himself. “It’s not like she--”

“Funerals aren’t for the dead, Steve,” Sam says. He doesn’t take his accusing glare off Bucky’s face. “They’re for the grieving.”

Bucky meets his gaze, and doesn’t defend himself. There’s no defense and he knows it. Steve lost his whole world. He’d gotten a piece of that back, with Bucky, but broken and twisted. He’d gotten another piece back with Peggy, only to lose it again to the slow, excruciating drag of dementia and old age.

And Bucky had let him go through that.

Alone.

“You wanna hear about it, since you weren’t there?” Sam says. His voice is shaking a little. “You wanna hear about--”

“Sam, that’s _enough,”_ Steve says, and it ain’t a request. That’s the Captain America voice, brooking no argument.

“I get the picture,” Bucky says lowly.

“Not sure you do,” Sam mutters.

“I will turn this bug around and hand you both over to General Ross if you don’t stop talking about me like -- like I ain’t even here,” Underneath the joke, Steve’s mad as hell and that makes Sam and Bucky actually close their mouths. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. 117 nations on our tail and you two find time to make it about the damn -- just get a little perspective, why doncha. Fuck’s sake.”

Bucky’s heart is in his throat, because it’s been years --  _decades_ since he heard little Stevie Rogers bawl someone out like that. “ _Ya got no right to make a gal feel like that.” “Why doncha mind your own for a change, huh?” “Hey, you wanna shut up?”_ All in that voice too big for his body, those words too brash for his size. He’d never talked like that, after. He’d made plenty of speeches, those big inspirational Captain America speeches: always the same ideas, the same fire behind it, the same voice, but Captain America never needed to be brash. 

Sam’s brows are up near his hairline, and Bucky wonders if it’s the swearing or the accent. He wonders how long it’s been since Steve slipped up and let his Brooklyn show like that.

Either way, they both shut the hell up, and the car lapses into silence.

 

* * *

 

_Can you move your seat up?_

_No._

 

* * *

 

Sharon Carter. Peggy’s niece. She’s a pretty classy looking dame. The kinda dame who looks like she could -- could take your head --

He has a vague memory.

A flurry of kicks from an Amazonian blonde, and then -- the Widow, who knew better than to fuck about. She’d hit him where it hurt most, but he’d been too deep down to feel it, really _feel_ it. But this gal -- the Carter gal -- she’d tried for a leg lock and he’d...

Thrown her into a table.

Jesus.

Bucky’s got a lot of apologizing to do. Just the thought of it exhausts him. Makes him feel prickly inside and out.

Out in front of the car, Sharon and Steve are both staring into the trunk of the car, and Bucky can’t quite see what’s in there from this angle, but when Steve looks up at Sharon, his face is all crumpled up with sincerity and gratitude. _Thank you, Sharon,_  he says, even though Bucky can’t really hear it. And then --

Oh.

Well, that’s to be expected, Bucky supposes, as he watches Steve swoop in and Sharon lean in too and they meet in the middle in a kiss that almost doesn’t look awkward.

Yeah. Dame looks like she could take your head clean off. Just Steve’s type.

And, you know. Just Bucky’s luck. It’s only to be expected, right?

 _Yeah,_ Bucky thinks, watching them break apart. It doesn’t hurt any more than anything else. He’s had worse. _Yeah, that figures._ Steve looks over and makes that face and -- oh what did you expect, pal? Expect us to avert our damn eyes?

The blush is clawing blotchily up into Steve’s cheeks by the time he gets back to the car, with Sam’s gear in hand.

“Took you long enough,” Sam says, approvingly.

Steve just turns pinker and shoves Sam’s wingpack and gear at him. He pulls back and flips the driver’s seat forward.

Bucky stares at him.

Steve jerks his head, minutely.

Bucky feels his jaw go tense, but he clambers out, carefully wary of his many (many) aches and bruises. The worst of it is still from catching himself on that fucking rail. That hurts all the way across his back and ribs, deep inside where the metal wraps around the bone. Steve steps back to let him, and then hends back towards Sharon’s car.

The woman herself is standing by the open driver’s side door, one arm on the roof, the other resting, crooked, on the open door. Where he can see she isn’t reaching for a weapon. She cocks her head. “We haven’t been properly introduced.”

Bucky stops, near the open trunk, and watches her, wary. “I’m Bucky.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she says.

“Bet you have.” Bucky makes himself look away from her, but can’t stop himself from scanning the area for threats and escape routes. “Sorry about earlier.”

“Wasn’t really you,” she says.

Bucky grimaces. It was. He doesn’t know how to make people understand that just because he wouldn’t have chosen that course doesn’t mean it _wasn’t him._

“Bucky,” Steve says gently.

Bucky looks and sees that his arms are full of the Cap gear. He jerks his head towards the trunk. Bucky looks down and sees--

His backpack.

It’s in his hands so fast that Steve takes a step back and Bucky vaguely registers that Carter is holding onto the car door a little more tightly now. His arm whines a little as he fumbles at the zips, wrenches the bag open. He peers around, then shoves his hand inside and taps his flesh fingers against the upturned spines. _Tap tap tap tap tap,_ they’re all there.

His shoulders slump. He looks up at Steve.

Steve swallows, looking like he’s about to cry or something.

Bucky looks at Sharon. Her eyes are wide too, and whatever she sees on his face is making her go just as gooey as Steve.

“You did this?” he asks.

She shrugs. Nods.

”CIA won’t like that.”

”I’d rather disappoint the CIA than disappoint myself,” she says. She’s as steady as a stone block, planted firm and confident. She’s got brown eyes; warm and knowing and he’d know eyes like that anywhere.

He doesn’t look away. “You’re Peggy Carter’s niece,” he states.

She nods again, like it was a question. She lifts her chin a little. She’s proud of that. It’s a legacy she’s proud to carry.

Bucky looks to Steve. “You trust her,” he says.

“With my life,” Steve confirms.

“With mine?” Bucky challenges. It’s maybe a dick move, but he needs to be sure, and it’s the fastest way he can think of to be sure. Whatever other doubts he has, Bucky can’t doubt that Steve values his life beyond anything else. Certainly beyond what’s fucking healthy.

Steve swallows thickly. “Yeah, Buck. She’s -- she’s good people.”

Bucky looks down at the go bag, the bag that Sharon must have taken out of lockup for him. _For him._ After he tried to kill her. Grudgingly, he admits to himself that she might be good enough for Steve. But he doesn’t want to let her have him. He doesn’t want to. It’s another selfish, petty instinct and he knows it but he can’t help that. He can’t help being greedy when it comes to Steve.

But. That doesn’t mean he gets to have Steve.

Carefully, Bucky tugs the zipper closed, leaving the journals inside. He drops it back into the trunk. He turns to Carter. “Hold onto that for me, willya?” If they don’t get outta this, if they get caught again, he doesn’t want his backpack rotting in some CIA vault, getting pawed over by agents. If she’s Peggy Carter’s niece, she’s smart enough to keep it safe. And if Steve trusts her...

Carter looks taken aback, but only for a moment. “Yeah,” she says. “Of course.”

“I owe you,” he adds, making himself hold her gaze.

“Nah,” she says, and her eyes go sidelong, just for a second, flitting to Steve, playful. Steve’s face is, remarkably, even mushier now. Carter turns her attention back to him. “It’s the least I can do.” She fucking means it too.

Bucky shakes his head. “You sound like him.”

“Thanks.”

“Wasn’t a compliment, lady.”

“Yeah it was.” Her smile is way too knowing. Carter -- _Peggy_ Carter had smiled like that. Jesus.

“Yeah, fine, it was.” Bucky shakes his head and turns. Gently, he punches Steve’s shoulder. “C’mon ya big lug. Let the nice lady go, she’s got important things to do.”

A vivid memory overtakes him: a memory of this. Exactly this, but displaced, in a different moment in time.

 _Let Agent Carter go, she’s got more important things to do,_ and Steve staring after her like she was his everything, and the little twist of the knife in Bucky's chest. _Thank you, Peggy,_ Steve had said, and she waved him away. _Away with you both,_ she said, laughing, and Bucky had hooked his arm around Steve’s shoulders and tugged.

“Thank you, Sharon,” he hears Steve say, behind him.

“See you later, Steve.”

 

Steve hooks his arm around Bucky’s shoulders and tugs. Maybe he’s caught in the memory too. He freezes up once he’s got his arm around Bucky, like he’s just realizing that maybe it’s a bad idea, but--

_Oh._

The thing that buzzes under Bucky’s skin goes quiet again, just for the space of a breath, two. His head becomes a quiet place, like a chapel between services; echoing and peaceful. The comfortable majesty of the rafters overhead, and forgiveness waiting in the wings. No words are needed, he can just exist. The feeling is so all-consuming (who knew that _peace_  could be all-consuming?) that Bucky can only hang his head a little and keep breathing.

“You okay, pal?” Steve says, sounding a little unsure of himself.

Bucky just nods.

Steve pulls his arm back. Bucky resists the urge to tug Steve into the back seat with him and use him like a weighted blanket. It wouldn’t be practical. Steve’s gotta drive, and if he did get to use Steve as a weighted blanket, who knows what would happen inside Bucky’s head. Instead, he just clambers awkwardly into the back again and stares at his own knees.

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm away from my usual computer just now, so if the formatting et al is a little fucked, that's why. 
> 
> Have I mentioned how much I love you guys? I love you guys. If you want to flail with me on my fandom tumblr, it’s here


	6. I Tried, and It's Never Enough

##  [6: Back of the Car](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZLOX3jDfFI)

 

 **I tried and it's never enough**   
I always jumped to hide when I needed your love   
I want to be the man in the back of the car   
I will let it ride   
Your love will carry me

\- by Miike Snow, 2016.

 

Bucky chases a memory halfway to Leipzig. It's hovering at the edge of his awareness, like a word on the tip of his tongue. It doesn't come to him until they're stuck in stop and go traffic outside the city and the guy in the car next to them is smoking and then he’s--

 

\--smoking by the barracks showers. He’s smoking his way through someone else’s ration, lighting the next from the butt of the last. By now his hands shoulda been shaking, he shoulda been buzzing under his skin but it was just like the fucking whiskey. What the hell are they putting in these smokes if not tobacco?

But he knows that ain't it at all.

“Spare a light?”

His head snaps up and there she is: pressed and perfect in her uniform skirt with the SSR badge on her lapel. Her lips and nails are red, her eyes are dark, glittering, and she's got an unlit cigarette between her first two fingers.

He grunts assent and she leans in. He lights her cigarette with the cherry end of his. With another woman, at another time -- another _lifetime_ , it feels like -- this might have been a flirty gesture. But this is after Azzano, and this is Peggy Carter. Their eyes lock and it doesn't feel at all like flirting. It feels like he's at home base, trying to read the pitcher's mind before the ball comes.

“Ta very much,” Carter says, once her cigarette is lit. She leans back, takes a drag. “So. Did you win at poker?”

“Pardon?”

She waves at the butt ends littering the ground around him. “No one goes through their own ration like that.”

“Heh. Guess not.” Bucky takes another long drag and thinks about someone else’s jacket hanging off the back of a chair, just the bare corner of the box poking out, and how he'd learned the trick of pickpocketing from his cousin Robbie. “Yeah. Let's say poker.”

“You seem like you've got a good poker face.” She smiles, but only with the corners of her eyes.

 _The hell is that supposed to mean?_ Bucky wonders. But he thinks he might have an idea. He says nothing: just flicks off the ash and takes another drag.

For a while, they smoke together in silence, and Bucky tries to get a read on her without much success. She's a sphinx of a person, like he can be, sometimes. You can get really fucking good at giving nothing away, especially if you've got something to hide. Arnie Roth was always awful at it, but plenty of other guys like them--

And that's something Bucky shouldn't even be _thinking_ about in the presence of Agent Fucking Carter.

“So. Sergeant. What are you doing out here, smoking by the showers instead of drinking in the pub with the rest of your team?”

 _The whiskey don't work on me and I’m just a little worried my face is going to start peeling off any old day now,_ Bucky thinks. It's a stupid thing to worry about, he knows. If he'd gotten the serum in that lab, he'd look more like Steve, or more like Schmidt, but he just looks like himself. The serum changes you inside and out. Whatever Zola did only fucked him up inside. Jesus.

He looks down at his toes, the useless cigarette butts littered all around him.

“I always usedta wait till I was about to shower to have a smoke. The smell of 'em would set Steve off, otherwise. Asthma. Can't shake the habit.” He looks up at her. “What about you? Ain't you risking your reputation, hanging out by the showers like this?”

She smiles again, wolf like. “Being captured and tortured by Hydra will change your idea of what counts as a risk, don't you agree?”

It’s a challenge, and she throws it between them like a gauntlet. He knew she’d been an agent, worked against Hydra, but he hadn’t known _that._ She says it so flippantly he can't help but let out half a bitter laugh. “Yeah, I'll fucking say.” And then he realizes what he just said and swears he can feel his ma's hand on the back of his head. “Sorry, Miss. Ma'am,” he corrects, and Christ, he hasn't been this tongue tied around a dame since grade school. “Agent Carter,” he lands on, clumsily.

Carter is unfazed. She blows out a ring of smoke. It drifts away and disperses. “I think at this point we can dispense with the fucking formalities, don't you?”

He laughs again. Christ. What a dame. No wonder Steve likes her.

He clears his throat. “I hear I got you to thank for Steve looking like three Steves wrapped in an American flag.” He says it evenly enough. It would be a joke, maybe, if he knew how he felt about it.

Carter scoffs. “Don’t look at me. That was all him. Well, and Erskine,” she says, a little softer. “But mostly Steve. You know.”

Yeah, Bucky does, if he's honest. There's no changing Steve's mind once he's set on a thing. There's only surviving it, and doing your best to make sure he does too.

“For what it’s worth, I am sorry,” Carter says.

He can’t help going tense. There are so many things she could be sorry for, and none of them are good. If one more person tells him that they’re sorry about the fucking _lab_ , or, frankly, the whole shitshow at Azzano, he is going to _lose it._

“About Steve,” she clarifies.

Except -- it doesn't clarify shit. Bucky's face is still and expressionless, but his brain is running panicky chicken circles wondering what the hell she _means._

“I don’t think he realizes how much the people who knew him miss the little guy,” Carter finishes.

Now Bucky goes still for a different reason entirely. She’d known the little guy. Steve said she’d _liked_ the little guy. It had been quite a thing to watch those big shoulders hunching in just the way little Steve's always had, when he was being self-deprecating. _I_ think _she wanted me before,_ Steve had mumbled, and _that_ had gotten Bucky's attention. That was the first time he thought maybe this dame was worth Steve's time.

Now, he watches her take another drag and continue. “Not that it isn’t marvelous, of course. A miracle of modern science, et cetera et cetera,” she waves the hand with the smoke in it. “But it’s like he thinks he’s done us all this massive favor, that no one could _possibly_ miss the old him.” She turns those darkly glittering eyes on him now. “You know?”

Bucky does know, but he doesn’t let it show. God does he miss the little guy. God does he miss _Steve,_ sometimes.

But he hates himself for it. He's seen how happy Steve is, like this. He's so much easier in himself, so much less angry now. What the hell kind of friend would wish him back into his old body with all it's pain and frailties?

Bucky swallows. “Guess you never saw him have an asthma attack. This is better.” He can almost believe it, too.

“I did, though,” she says. “And no, it isn't.”

“No?” He says, still keeping his voice carefully flat.

Carter shakes her head and shifts her curls back over one shoulder.  “Steve's got more fight in him than anyone I've ever met. I've seen him fight for respect, for a chance to prove himself. I've seen him fight to _breathe,_ and I've seen him fight to get you back.”

Bucky swallows and clenches his teeth together, biting back whatever expression his face wants to make at that little turn of phrase.

Carter's eyes glitter, catching the red light from their cigarette ends. “But there's no fighting a bullet. Not if it's got your name on it.”

And ain't that the truth. Steve's in no less danger now, and all the medicine in the world won't save him from a Nazi with a gun. Bucky thinks of the slaughter at Azzano, his friends going up in smoke and scraps of ash, all those men dying, and for what? Six inches of mud in bumfuck nowhere?

“And there's no fighting the brass,” Bucky adds bitterly. “If they decide to make you cannon fodder.”

“Oh, I can fight the brass, don't you worry about that,” Carter clips back, quick as can be “If _you_ watch his back in the field.”

Bucky blinks at her. “Lady, I've been watching his back since 1930, you think I'm gonna stop now? Just cuz there's Nazis involved?”

Carter shrugs, unruffled. “No one would blame you for going home, after everything. Steve wouldn’t.”

 _“I_ would,” Bucky snaps. “Fuck off, lady. I ain’t leaving him.”

“Good,” she says brightly.

He stares at her. Is that what this was about? She was getting the measure of him, to see if she could trust him to have Steve’s back in the field. Half of him is offended. Who the fuck does she think she is? The other half of him is grudgingly admiring. And reluctantly grateful that she seems to have Steve’s back in return.

“You’re a real piece of work, ain’t you,” he says.

“Yes, I am. Thank you.”

He huffs. He drops his cigarette and stomps it out with his toe. “Jesus, you don't gotta tell me he needs looking after. You watched his back when I couldn’t. I’ll watch his back when you can’t. Deal?”

She grins, cigarette clenched tight between her white teeth. “Pleasure doing business with you, Sergeant Barnes.”

Bucky scoffs a little. “Please. Call me--”

 

“--Buck?”

It's Steve's voice. Here. In the present.

Bucky blinks. He finds Steve staring at him in the mirror. Bucky realizes he has no idea where they are now. They’re still in the car but their surroundings have changed, and Bucky lost time.

It’s been a while since _that_ happened.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” Bucky grunts, and slumps to one side, hiding from the reflection of Steve's worried eyes.

He stares at nothing, and the image of Carter’s smile haunts him. They had a deal. It was a deal that went both ways.

They'd both failed, in the end. Her in 1945, trying to talk Steve down from a plane in the Arctic, and him in 2014, when he ran like a goddamn coward. He can forgive Peggy Carter. She at least _tried._ God, no wonder Steve loved her so fucking much. Of course Bucky would forgive her.

He isn’t sure he'll forgive himself anytime soon.

But he can at least _try._

 

* * *

 

They stop not too far from Leipzig and Steve gets out of the car with his burner phone and goes off to stand in a field and adopt his _talking on the phone_ pose, one hand on his hip, the other at his ear, Charles Atlas shoulders tipped slightly to one side.

Sam is stonily saying nothing. Silences, even awkward ones, are much easier than words, but…

Bucky’s been a terrible friend long enough. He should at least fucking _ask,_ right?

“Hey,” Bucky says. “Steve and Sharon. How long has that been going on?”

_“Really?”_

“Yeah, yeah, I get that you don’t like me, can we just--”

“It hasn’t been _going on._ This is new,” Sam says shortly.

“She alright?”

“Yes.”

Bucky sighs in frustration. “Listen. I’m not -- I’m fucking _trying,_ okay?”

Sam glances back at him, just a flash of dark eyes.

“I get it, alright, you wanna kick my ass in a parking lot for hurting your best friend. Fine. Good. I’ll do my best to let you get your licks in and not kill you with my evil robot arm. Believe it or not, I’m fuckin’ _glad_ someone was watching his back while I was -- while I couldn’t. And I ain’t here to -- I ain’t gonna take your place or nothing. I’m too much of a fucking mess to -- I can’t be his --”

Bucky grits his teeth. Fucking words. He can never get them lined up right. Not anymore. “Just. I’m worried about the asshole. I figure you know the feeling.”

Sam’s gaze doesn’t exactly become friendly, but it does become less frosty, and that’s something. That was like running a word marathon, for Bucky. He feels like he might be all out of words for a bit.

Sam sighs. “You ain’t wrong to be worried about him. We’re doing our best, but he’s got more issues than National Geographic, you know what I’m saying?”

Bucky gives an affirmative grunt.

“You heard what happened with the plane?”

Bucky scowls. Yeah. He heard what fucking happened with the fucking plane.

“Well, then he woke up and SHIELD was in charge of his recovery, and we didn’t know _then_ , but of course _SHIELD_ being in charge of his recovery meant that _fucking Hydra_ was…”

Bucky’s eyes slam shut.

“Yeah,” Sam says, seeing the penny drop. “Time I met him it was... three years later? He was just about functioning, but that was mostly his own shitty DIY coping skills you know? No one had been helping him, not really. But the Avengers got their own medical team now. And Stark may be… _Stark,_ but he knows the value of good mental health care. It’s helping. Steve’s leveled out a lot since I’ve known him.”

“Leveled out,” Bucky says flatly.

“He’s been training the newbies, seems happier now that he’s on site at the compound, not so many of those 3 am marathons he used to--”

“He’s living on base?” Bucky cuts in.

Sam pauses. “Uh. Yeah.”

Bucky closes his eyes again. “Fuck.”

“Hey man.” Sam’s back to being defensive. “Sometimes people don’t adjust right away. It’s okay to take baby steps between the Army and civilian life.”

“He’s not fuckin’ -- he wasn’t in _the army,_ Jesus Christ,” Bucky mutters under his breath.

“What do you mean he _wasn’t in the army?”_ Sam says, incredulous, almost laughing. “He _won_ World War Two.”

“With the _Commandos,_ not the _Army._ He had _two weeks_ of Basic and then he was a chorus girl for five months and then he jumped out of a goddamn plane!”

“Jesus,” Sam says, the penny dropping for him now.

“Yeah.”

“He never said--”

“Of course he didn’t.” Bucky folds his arms across his chest and scowls at his own knees. “He never says anything.”

Sam runs a hand over his face. “Oh God.”

“Living on fucking base,” Bucky mumbles. “He’s never lived on a base in his life. Christ. No wonder he can’t stop doing the fucking -- _voice.”_

Sam twists further around in his seat. “Alright, but listen--”

They’re interrupted by a tap on Sam’s window. Steve is there, looking positively thunderous. For a second, Bucky thinks he must have been listening in, but when Sam cranks down the window, Steve holds out his hand. “Knife,” he says. “I know you got one.”

Sam blinks, but dutifully pulls a nice little blade out from his boot and offers it to Steve. It’s short enough to be mistaken for a pocket knife -- he could probably sneak it past a lot of security, but the way he handles it makes Bucky’s brain light up with threat assessment.

He quashes it mercilessly.

Meanwhile, Steve has the knife and is now stalking around to the front of the car. Through the stupendously ridiculous design of the Volkswagen Beetle, Sam and Bucky get to stare in fish-mouthed astonishment as Steve throws open the front-end trunk of the Bug. He rummages around, muttering loudly enough to be heard inside the car.

“Where’ss the -- can’t believe he just -- it's _Wanda,_ not a goddamn --”

Sam and Bucky exchange a look.

“ _Fucking Stark,”_ Steve hisses as he slams the front shut. He's holding his uniform top -- the bit with the shoulder armor and the high collar. He drapes it over the curved hood of the car. It starts to slide down. He pins it viciously enough to make the Bug rock a little and starts going at it with the knife.

“Steve, what the hell--”

“He _locked her up,_ Sam.” Steve says, working at something on the shoulder, wedging the edge of the blade under there and prying at it.

“Steve,” Sam says, sounding tired now.

 _“They_ locked her up,” Steve says. He might be talking to himself. “Vision too. He got _Vision_ to -- She’s a _kid._ They _both_ are. Just a coupla dumb--”

“The hell is he talkin’ about?” Bucky mutters.

“Wanda Maximoff,” Sam mutters back. He gives Bucky a look. “She got her powers in a Hydra cell. Vis is, uh. Harder to explain.”

Bucky’s mouth goes thin and he watches as Steve finally pries whatever the hell it was off the shoulder. He tosses it angrily aside.

“Jesus,” Sam mutters.

“What was that?” Bucky asks.

“Avengers insignia.”

Bucky rubs his face with one hand. _Steve you goddamn drama queen._

Steve throws the suit top back in and slams the hood, then walks away, his shoulders taut with anger.

Sam sighs, looks at Bucky for a moment, but then shakes his head and goes to open the passenger door. It’s automatic for Bucky to reach out -- it’s an instinct older than memory. He puts his hand on Gabe’s -- fuck. On _Sam’s_ shoulder and shakes his head. “Let him go.”

Sam shakes off the hand and looks at Bucky like Bucky just suggested he kick a puppy or something. “That is exactly the kind of bullshit thinking that got us into this mess.” He practically throws himself out of the car, leaving Bucky alone in the back seat.

But then, at the last minute, he leans back in, one hand holding the door open, the other on the frame. “Listen, man. Whatever he was when you knew him, that was then. Maybe he wasn’t in the army, but now? He's a _soldier,_ just like the rest of us.”

Sam closes the door and goes after Steve.

Bucky closes his eyes and bows his head. He drops his forehead into his hands. The Arm purrs out a calibration loop. The fingers are cool against his skin, but not very comfortable. Unyielding, as always, and the senses dulled, like feeling everything through a thick glove.

It's true, Bucky knows. The skinny punk he knew may not be dead, but he's never coming back either. The loss of him hits Bucky all over again. Bucky feels sick. He shoulda stayed away. He shoulda kept running after he left the US, he shoulda --

_That is exactly the kind of bullshit thinking that got us into this mess._

Maybe Wilson is right. Maybe if Bucky had come back to Steve, they wouldn’t be on the run, maybe the Soldier wouldn’t have wreaked havoc in Berlin. If nothing else he coulda spared Steve some pain, in London.

_You watched his back when I couldn’t. I’ll watch his back when you can’t._

He hasn't been keeping up his side of the bargain.

He lifts his head, sees that Sam has reached Steve’s side. Their backs are turned to the car, heads tipped away so he can’t read their lips, and far enough away that Bucky can’t overhear what they’re saying.

And Bucky’s pretty confident that’s deliberate.

He grabs the dumb, dog-smelling blanket, pulls it up over himself, and does what he can to wedge himself flat in the back seat, face turned to the backrest, the plasticky smell of the car and the wet reek of the blanket thick in his nose.

He closes his eyes and tries to will himself into unconsciousness. If he can’t achieve that, he can at least be still.

 

The downside of being still, with super hearing, is that he can, occasionally, catch the odd snatches of discussion, when Steve raises his voice.

“--time, every damn time, Sam,” Steve is saying. “The SSR -- SHIELD, the whole damn country, the whole -- and now the Avengers too? ”

“I know, man.”

“I put my faith in something, and it corrupts, it _always_ corrupts. I gave my life for this shit -- _Bucky_ gave his life for this.”

“I mean, neither of you did, but--”

_“Sam.”_

“I’m not -- I don’t mean it like that, man, I mean you got a second chance here. You both do.”

That seems to mollify Steve, if only for a moment.

 

After a few quieter back and forths, the murmur rises to a roar again. “This is exactly why I won’t sign that--”

“Steve, I’m with you on this, but come on. You know that shit like this is exactly why Tony thinks we _do_ need the Accords.”

“Well he’s _wrong!”_ Steve bellows.

“Come on man, I _agree with you,”_ Sam says, and their voices drop back out of Bucky’s hearing again.

 

Later:

“I’m so tired of this _goddamn job,”_ Steve says.

“I know you are.”

 

When Sam and Steve get back to the car, Bucky hears Steve shifting around to look back at him, and Sam mutter: “Nah, man, let him rest. Whatever happens in Leipzig, he's going to need the rest.”

Bucky’s pretty sure that Steve can tell he’s not sleeping, but he lets Bucky have the quiet moment anyway. Bucky will take it. He’s selfish like that.

 

* * *

 

_They're evacuating the airport._

_Stark._

_Suit up._

 

* * *

 

“Hey.”

Bucky looks up and finds Sam looking at him, goggles pushed up onto his forehead. Steve is coordinating with Clint and the new guy over on the other side of the van, even as he secures his gloves and gear.

“Listen,” Sam says. “There’s a good chance we ain’t all getting out of this. We’re still outmatched. Even Steve can’t fully compensate for that.”

Bucky watches him warily. They both know that Steve’s real superpower is his tactical brain -- he always knew how to make the Commandos fight like a full batallion and that was only partly because Steve was like a particularly agile Panzer division all on his own. But they are outmatched. Especially if Vision is there. And he will be. “And?” Bucky asks.

“Push comes to shove, you stick with Steve, alright? I’ll do what I can to get you two clear, but you gotta stay with him.  You two together have the best chance against those Soldiers, and they gotta be stopped. Can’t lose sight of that.” It costs Sam something to say this, Bucky can tell. “So. Soon as we regroup and head for the quinjet, you stick with Steve no matter what. Don’t run off again.”

Bucky nods, accepting the command. “You watched his back when I couldn’t. I'll watch his back when you can't,” he says.

“Or I'll falcon kick you again.”

The corner of Bucky's mouth twitches a little.

“What?” Sam says.”You think I won't? I absolutely will, you know.”

“I know you will, it's just… You know who you sound like, right?” Bucky says.

Sam frowns.

“I’m just saying, you’d make a good Captain America.”

The look of shock on Sam’s face is priceless. “Man, shut the hell up,” he mutters, and pulls his goggles down again.

 

* * *

 

And in the end, Sam is right. And this, Bucky keeps up his end of the bargain, but…

“I don’t know if I’m worth all this, Steve.”

“What you did all those years. It wasn’t you.”

He says it like Captain America. He’s still doing the goddamn voice. Bucky still hates it. But.

Well.

Captain America doesn’t lie, does he.

 _It wasn’t you._ Like that’s the part that matters.

“I know.” Bucky chews the inside of his lip a little. “But I did it,” he says dully, staring at Steve’s profile, marveling at how naive this idiot can be, sometimes.

Steve looks away, and the silence falls back between them. Bucky is grateful for it, but he can _feel_ Steve wanting to say something.

“Is that--” Steve looks down, like he can hide _more._

Bucky debates briefly. Which is worse: the unasked question, or continuing the conversation? He sighs and lets his head fall back. “Just ask, Steve.”

Steve squares up his shoulders, but he doesn’t look around. “Is that why you didn’t come back?”

Bucky’s forehead wrinkles up. He looks down at his lap. “To you?” he asks, for clarification.

“Not just me,” Steve says, too quickly. Defensive. “To… anyone. The Avengers. Or… whatever. The good guys.”

 _There are no good guys, Steve,_ Bucky wants to say. _Not with something like me._ The Winter Soldier is too powerful. Too _valuable._ A man who can kill anyone, if you “ask” the right way? An assassin who leaves no evidence behind? It’s too great a temptation: even the best of the good guys would have trouble resisting the urge to just “take care” of a few people. His mere _existence_ is corruptive.

But that’s not what Steve asked. He wants to know if it was the guilt, the shame that kept Bucky away. “No,” he says.

“Then what--”

Steve cuts himself off again, the two words sharp like glass shards. Bucky watches Steve’s jaw flexing, and looks away, not wanting to see the hurt that he put there. He doesn’t say anymore. If Steve wants answers, he’s going to have to finish asking his damn questions.

“Why didn’t you come back sooner?” Steve asks, squaring up to the question the way he used to square up to a bully who was about to beat his ass.

Bucky is already exhausted. “Couldn’t,” he says. He knows that now. He couldn’t have come back earlier. The risk was too great.

Steve’s grip on the controls goes briefly white-knuckled. “The hell kind of answer is that.” And there’s his anger: low and dangerous.

“Not the one you wanted?” Bucky says, dry as dust.

Steve’s shoulders are tense, creeping up towards his ears. “I think,” he says, with careful control, “you owe me more of an explanation than that, Sergeant.”

“I ain’t a sergeant.”

_“Bucky.”_

“Did you dream while you were in the ice?” Bucky asks.

“What the hell does that--”

“Just answer the question.”

“No I didn’t dream while I was in the ice,” Steve says curtly.

“I did.” Bucky’s voice sounds soft and faraway in his own ears. “Had this nightmare. Couldn’t make sense of much. Couldn’t remember anything. Just. Running on instincts. And there’s all these people telling me to kill for them, using my hands to do their dirty work, telling me not to worry. They’d do all the _planning.”_

Steve goes very still.

Bucky swallows. “Only it wasn’t a nightmare.”

Steve mashes a button. An automated voice says something about an autopilot, but Steve ignores it,  He turns in his chair and stares at Bucky with the color draining out of his face. “What’re you saying?”

Bucky didn’t want to say any of this, but he can’t lie to Steve. Not about this. Not about any of it. “M’saying I took to it like a duck to water, pal.”

Bucky meets Steve’s eyes long enough to see that Steve gets it. What Bucky did for Hydra wasn’t all that different from what he’d been doing since 1930. That’s what happens when you let someone else be your moral compass. That’s the risk of outsourcing your integrity. But Bucky had never been sure of anything in his life, except Steve. Steve had always been righteous, and reliable, and _there._

Until he wasn’t.

“Bucky,” Steve starts. He sounds sick.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Bucky says, looking down at his mismatched hands. “Not your fault. Not my fault. Still happened. I just couldn’t risk it happening again is all.” Everything he’s been doing since he woke up in DC, has been about not being _that_ anymore. And of course, the second Steve turned up, he was again. He had to be _that_ again. Triggers or no triggers. He’d been the Soldier for the fake psychiatrist, but he’d been the Soldier for Steve too. In Leipzig, just now. Steve hadn’t even needed to _ask._ He didn’t need any goddamn words. That was the thing about Steve.

“God -- I’m sorry,” Steve says.

Bucky shakes his head. He feels like his throat is starting to close up, like there isn’t enough _air_ up here. “Wasn't just that,” he says, trying for unaffected. It comes out sounding robotic, he knows. His voice is even, the way it always is when things start going off the rails. “There were other things. Used to look after you. Can’t do that anymore. Used to make people laugh. Don’t know how to do that anymore.” All the things he can’t do anymore crash violently against that deep-seated fear of not being able to _complete the mission._ The grief of everything he’s lost is like a slick spill of gasoline on his soul. The terror that drove the Soldier on and on and on: that’s a spark. “Used to go dancing, used to think I’d be an engineer, used to think I’d never leave Brooklyn.” Everything is going up in smoke.

His voice is steady, until it _isn’t_ anymore. “C-can’t--” His brain stutters over the word, as the terror spirals beyond what he can mask.

Steve is looking at him just the way he used to look at babies. There’s an edge of panic in his eyes that he never got while facing down Nazis.

This is a thing that’s happening: Bucky is breathing too fast, feels like the walls of the Quinjet are pushing in around him while the windshield falls away. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia all at the same time. Neat. The seatbelt feels like restraints. Awesome. Great. He fumbles for the clasp. “Sorry. I shouldn’t’a--”

“Bucky,” Steve says, alarmed this time.

Bucky struggles free from the seatbelt and lurches up. “Sorry,” he says again. He doesn’t know _why_ this is _happening._  Why _now?_ “I -- just a-a second --”

“What do you need?” Steve asks, all business, reaching for his own seatbelt.

“Just stay there,” Bucky snaps. “Don’t crash the fuckin’ plane, Rogers.” He staggers towards the back of the jet, breathing hard.

There’s a dark corner near the rear hatch and he wedges his back in between two storage crates. From here he can see the whole space, pretty much. He can see Steve, sitting tense and straight-backed, practically vibrating with the urge to _do something_ even though Bucky told him to _stay._

Bucky puts his head down between his knees and curves his arms over his skull. He thinks of an ostrich putting its head in the sand. It would maybe be nice to bury his head in sand, if he could work out a way to keep breathing and somehow not have sand in his hair afterwards. It would be warm, and dry, and silent. He thinks of the feeling of warm sand between his toes, summers at Rockaway Beach. Steve there too, getting sunburned. He tries to get his head to spiral in that direction, instead of deeper and deeper into fear and darkness.

Because they’re going back to Siberia. At best, this is a suicide mission. At worst…

Well. Bucky ain’t kidding himself here: there’s a real good chance this ends with him back in Hydra’s clutches.

 

It takes him a few minutes to work up the ability to stand on his own two feet. He prowls back and forth across the rear of the jet for a moment, then just leans against the table and stares at nothing at all.

He hears Steve get up from the pilot’s chair and… yeah, sure, the autopilot is probably more reliable than Mr. The Arctic Seems Like A Good Landing Strip.

Steve walks carefully into Bucky’s line of sight before coming any closer. Bucky tries not to track him. He doesn’t really succeed.

“Bucky?” There’s a whole lotta question there.

“Yeah,” Bucky says.

“You gonna be alright to… It could be bad down there.”

Bucky grits his teeth at the sturdy ringing tones of _that voice._ “I know,” he says. He’s walking straight into the den where all his nightmares live, where all his horrors were born.

Luckily, he can usually function just fine while paralyzed with terror. Long as he’s got a mission objective and a gun in his hand.

“If you need to sit this one out—“

“Don’t even finish that sentence,” Bucky says. “You need me. I can do it. So just. Don’t.”

Silence slips between them. Bucky doesn’t look at Steve. Steve doesn’t look at Bucky.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, still standing a few feet away.

“For what?” Bucky asks. But he’s asking it the way Sister Agatha used to. I _know what you did wrong. Do_ you?

Steve rolls his eyes, recognizing the tone. “Dragging you back into this mess,” he says. Then, more sincerely: “You made it clear every way you could that you wanted to be left alone. Nat was right. She told me to stay home. That I’d only make it worse. She was right.” Steve ducks his head. “I always make things worse,” he mumbles.

“You always make things _harder,”_ Bucky corrects. “Harder ain’t always worse. And Natashka is _usually_ right… But not this time,” he admits.

Steve gives him a surprised look.

Bucky just shakes his head. “Yeah I coulda gotten away clean if you’d stayed out of it, which woulda been a nice thing for a friend to do, by the way. But… Wouldn’t’a worked in the long run. One way or another Zemo woulda found the base, and then where would we be?”

Steve looks down. “I’m still sorry. I should’ve respected your wishes.”

“Yeah, you should have,” Bucky says, a little meanly. Then he closes his eyes. “But…” he sighs. “I’m sorry too.”

“For what?” Steve asks, a hint of a teasing tone.

Bucky gives him a look. “Being too chickenshit scared to come back sooner.”

Steve makes a _nah, it’s fine,_ face and tries to wave it away.

“I left you alone out here,” Bucky says, relentless.

The steady look on Steve’s face cracks a little. There’s something raw underneath, the kind of loneliness Bucky never sees, not even in himself. But Bucky learned to keep people at arm’s length a long time ago, and Steve… for all his stoic posturing, he’s a softie. And Bucky knew that. He _knew that._

“I shouldn’t have left you like that,” Bucky says. “I’m supposed to be your friend. Friends ain’t supposed to do shit like that to each other.”

Steve swallows audibly. “No, you’re right.” He gives Bucky a look, and Bucky’s shorted out circuit board brain dredges up a memory. “Friends ain’t supposed to do shit like that.”

And Steve is skinny, and looks ill, and has a bucket in his lap. Bucky-Then had talked him into drinking the night before and now he’s too sick to go out, and he’s going to miss the Dodgers game they’d managed to get tickets to. He is giving Bucky a pissy-cat look that Bucky knows somewhere deep in his bones. The look means that means Steve is mad. Steve is always mad, but this specific look means that Steve is mad _at Bucky,_ but won’t be for long. Forgiveness is coming, just not quite yet.

In the present, in the quinjet, the pissy-cat looks cracks down the middle and there’s that sadness again. Steve smiles, and it’s just about the worst smile Bucky’s ever seen on the punk’s face. “But. We’ve never been real good at _ain’t supposed to.”_

Bucky stares at Steve, and thinks of a different version of them. Maybe in some other universe, some kinder universe, they lived the lives they were supposed to have, and died the deaths they were supposed to get, and never knew how fucking lucky they were.

Bucky clears his throat. “Yeah. No shit.”

An alert beeps from the console, and Steve turns. There’s a light flashing over by the pilot’s chair. Steve crosses over to it, looks out at the swirling snow. “We’re here.”

 

* * *

 

_She’s gotta be a hundred years old by now._

_So are we, pal._  


 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hear it's fic writer appreciation day. so here'a a fic writer, appreciating you guys. <3<3<3 
> 
> Come into tumblr-lair [here](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/), and if you want to listen to the Playlist so far, I finally made it to the future and put it [on spotify.](https://open.spotify.com/user/zqsf1pytlcze3ld062ojtj6ny/playlist/3bvuoD4OwfKnUqjYOPIVGf)


	7. Do You Belong? I Do, I Do.

##  [7: Weary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Y5gk8J7XQ)

But you know that a king is only a man  
With flesh and bones, he bleeds just like you do  
He said, "Where does that leave you?"  
And, **"Do you belong?"** **  
I do, I do**

\- by Solange Knowles, 2016

 

Bucky is on the pavement -- he’s in the snow -- he’s on the _concrete._ He’s in Brooklyn -- he’s in Austria -- he’s in _Siberia._

He has two arms. He’s lost his arm. He’s lost _the Arm._

Again.

He’s lost his grip on reality.

Again.

Steve is fighting a bully in an alley in Brooklyn -- he’s fighting a Nazi in a barn in Austria -- he’s fighting _Stark_ in a _silo_ in _Siberia._

Steve is thrown like a ragdoll, hopelessly outmatched, and he hits the walls of the -- the -- the alley.

“Stay down. Final warning.”

He’s behind a movie theater in Brooklyn and the stink of garbage is in his nose. He’s in a bunker in Siberia, and he’s rolled over onto the shorted out stump of his arm, and it makes him want to scream, but he has to do something, because Steve is wheezing the way he does when he’s taken a fist to the diaphragm and can’t catch his breath. He won’t stay down. He’s getting up now. He never knows when to stay down and Bucky has to _do something--_

“I can do this all day.”

There’s the sound of a Hydra gun powering up, and Bucky’s on the dirty floor of a barn in Austria, trying to get the drop on a Hydra mook in armor, with one of those big blue rifles. Bucky’s got two arms -- he’s got one arm -- he’s got two arms -- he grabs the guy’s leg -- _shoot me instead, shoot me --_

He gets a boot to the face and feels hot blood burst from his nose. He can barely see anything, but he looks at Steve and--

There’s a look on Steve’s face. Bucky knows that look. He’d know that look if Hydra had taken his brain right out of his skull. He knows it in his bones. He knows it on himself, he knows it on Steve, he knows it on the Widows, he knows it on every friend he’s ever had who’s seen too many horrors.

Steve’s lost his grip on reality too. He’s in an alley in Brooklyn. He’s in a barn in Austria. He’s fighting a robot in Sokovia, maybe. He’s tearing the suit apart with his bare hands. He’s making these small, desperate sounds -- the same kinda noises he used to make eighty years ago, when he was getting the shit beaten out of him. He’s throwing punches with no grace, using the shield with all the finesse of a caveman armed with a rock, ripping the faceplate off, 98 years of rage and pain and the superserum and--

 _\--Steve scrabbles for the shield, snatches it off the floor, lifts it over his head and brings it_ down.

_Bucky feels sick. That's his friend, there. That's little Stevie Rogers who picked sidewalk flowers for his ma and never forgot her birthday, not once. God. What would Sarah Rogers say if she could see what Bucky let them turn her son into?_

_Steve sags over the shield, catching his breath. The stench of blood thick in Bucky's nose. Nazi blood smells just the same as everyone else's, and--_

No. He's in a _silo._ In _Siberia._ With _Stark._

Steve wrenches the shield out of Stark’s chestplate (not his neck not this time thank fuck) and staggers over to Bucky. Bucky stares up at him through a haze of pain and shock. Steve looks so tired: blood on his cheek, and at the corner of his mouth, and coming from his temple under the helmet. Bucky hears in his head, _you got no quit, you don’t know when to give up, you_ always _stand up--_

Steve holds out his hand. Every move pains Bucky, the shorting circuits sending pain ricocheting along his nerves, but he takes the offered hand, and lets Steve haul him up off the floor. This is a dance that Bucky knows the steps to. He hooks his arm over Steve’s shoulder, and Steve curls his arm around Bucky’s waist, tight.

And despite the pain, despite the guilt and the shock of losing his arm (again), something in Bucky unknots.

“That shield doesn’t belong to you.”

Bucky tries to get his feet under him. He’s sure Steve can take the weight, but he shouldn’t have to.

“You don’t deserve it!”

Steve’s arm tightens around Bucky’s waist. Bucky is so tired, he can only hear the words with a sense of dulled annoyance.

“My _father_ made that shield!”

Bucky feels the sigh coming out of Steve, like it’s coming out of his own body. Feels Steve’s shoulders go back, his chin tip up just a little, like a man coming out from deep waters.

The shield drops. Steve leaves it behind.

He doesn’t leave Bucky behind.

Bucky’s head lolls, and he maybe grays out a little. Steve’s got him, so it’s fine. They’re leaving the bunker, leaving Stark, leaving the Arm and the shield. They’re done now. They can stop.

Bucky lets his head fall against Steve’s shoulder.

They’re going back out the way they came in, slowly, like the old men they sometimes are. Bucky can’t exactly keep up his side of the conversation, but that doesn’t stop Steve.

“C’mon pal,” he’s saying, softly. How long has he been talking. “You and me now. We’re gonna be fine. It’s over. We’re done.”

They’re in the elevator again, side by side instead of face to face. He’s glad the elevator still works, honestly he doesn’t think he’d have made it up those stairs. His breath is coming shallow and fast. Like Steve’s used to. Like he--

 _“--can’t even remember what a full breath feels like,_ God, _I just--” and then Steve isn’t just gasping through an asthma attack, he’s trying not to start crying, because that’s only gonna make it worse, he--_

\--can’t breathe.

“Gotta get you outta here, cleaned up, and then you and me are gonna get the biggest damn steak dinner you ever laid eyes on, pal,” Steve is saying. It’s mindless. Where the hell are they gonna get a steak dinner? They’re wanted fugitives. They just had a fistfight with Iron Man and won -- kind of. They’re the two most wanted men in the world and...

“Steve,” Bucky gasps. Something is wrong. Something is very wrong. “Steve, I can’t--”

The elevator doors open, cold air blasting in, and Steve says: “Come on, pal, you’re gonna be fine. I got ya.”

“No--” Bucky gasps, more and more labored. “Steve -- can’t -- breathe, I--”

Steve freezes, and then Bucky’s being eased onto the floor. It’s cold, freezing up here in the hall between the elevator and the open bunker doors. The floor is cold, and Steve is trying to arrange him into something like the recovery position, but that only makes it worse, and Bucky cries out, weakly.

Steve hauls him up, and Bucky knows this position, the tripod shape of it, to ease Stevie’s breathing while he talks him through it, or gets the asthma cigarette lit. But Steve had always held his own weight, and Bucky can’t right now, His face is half mashed into Steve’s chest, the star pressed against his cheek.

“The Arm,” he manages. “Reinforcements. Ribs. Can’t. They’re -- dead.” That’s where the problem is, he realizes. The Arm isn’t just an arm, it’s got its metal tentacles all along his left side, but they’re dead now. His left side is a solid metal cage. His ribcage can barely expand at all. Even the right side is struggling to fill.

“Hey, hey, I got you,” Steve says. His hand is on the back of Bucky’s neck, grounding. “Come on. Breathe with me, yeah? In, nice and slow. Come on, just keep -- you gotta keep breathing, you--”

Under Bucky’s face, Steve’s chest hitches, like he’s biting back a sob, then he takes a deep, slow breath. Bucky does too, lets it out on a wheeze and a shudder.

“You can’t die on me, pal,” Steve says. “Not now, okay?”

Bucky thinks about the tail end of that fight, watching Steve hammering the shit out of Stark, 200 pounds of unstoppable wrath beating the suit to pieces with his fists and his shield and… Bucky isn’t afraid _of_ Steve, but he’s afraid _for_ other people, if Steve were to lose it. He knows how easy it is to slip from one side of that line to the other. And just because Steve is _Steve_ doesn’t mean he’s immune to that.

The world might not survive Steven Grant Rogers losing his shit. So Bucky kind of has to keep living. For everyone’s sake.

“‘Kay,” Bucky says.

And then he blacks out. He thinks, maybe, he can hear Steve screaming for help.

 

* * *

 

He wakes up with a _mask_ over his face.

His heart rate ratchets from slumber to panic so fast that it feels like it’s being ripped right outta his chest. He claws free from the mask. There’s a strange, harsh, animal sound in his ears, a high panicked whine and it takes him a moment to realize it’s coming from him.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he hears, from a distance, strangely muffled.

“Autopilot engaged,” says a soft, feminine robot voice. But it’s weirdly distorted sounding, far away from him.

And then there’s a face over him. Steve’s helmet is gone, and Steve is talking to him, still sounding muffled and faraway, even though he’s right there, and it occurs to Bucky that the trouble is with his ears, not Steve’s voice. It’s like he’s underwater, listening to Steve saying: “Hey, buddy, hey, no you need the oxygen, yeah? I know it sucks, but you gotta have the oxygen, so you gotta put the mask back on.”

Gradually, Steve’s babbling comes through more clearly, and Bucky lets him ease the mask back over his face.

He's in the quinjet.

He's fine.

Steve's here.

“That’s it, yeah, okay?”

Bucky nods, squeezes Steve’s hand. “‘Kay,” he says again.

“You sure?”

Bucky nods again. “Yeah.” His voice is muffled under the oxygen mask, but still comprehensible. He even manages to make a wry face. “Situation normal.”

Steve’s face breaks into shaky relief. “All fucked up,” he finishes.

“Language,” Bucky says, just like Steve used to say to him.

That, for whatever fucking reason, makes Steve’s face crumple up like paper, going red in a minute, and then he’s bowing his head. This isn’t the Single Manly American Tear of Captain Asshole, this is just little Stevie Rogers crying big fat snotty tears.

“Hey,” Bucky says, soft and startled because _Steve is crying_ and that makes all kinds of weird alarms start blaring in Bucky’s head.

And then Steve just kind of throws himself over Bucky, and then jerks back awkwardly, when he apparently remembers that Bucky’s hurt. Like Steve _ain’t_ hurt. Geeze.

“S-sorry,” he says, hovering, unable to meet Bucky’s eyes. “Shit. M’sorry, Buck, I just--”

Bucky moves his right hand to the top of Steve’s head and pats clumsily, which only makes Rogers bawl all the harder. Bucky tugs him down and Steve flops back across him, face pressing into Bucky's filthy shirt. His hands fist in the material. It's not exactly comfortable to have 240 pounds of supersoldier half on top of him, but it also feels kinda nice. Steve makes a hell of a weighted blanket. Emphasis on weighted.

And Bucky realizes: he’s not panicking. He’s on a table, mask on his face, medical equipment beeping in his ear, and he’s not panicking. Maybe he’s just too tired for it, maybe his head is too stunned with shock. Maybe it’s the big blond idiot dripping tears onto his chest. Steve breaks all kinds of rules, and everything gets _quieter_ when Steve is nearby.

 _Nearby._ Scratch that. It's when Steve's _touching_ him. That's when it all goes quiet.

Well, quiet except for the soft burbling sobs of Captain goddamn America. Jesus. Bucky clumsily cards his fingers through Steve’s hair: gentle, gentle, gentle. He hears himself making shushing sounds, mindless. Steve sounds like he's actively fighting with his own tears, but it's probably good for him to let it out a little, right?

Poor Steve. S’been a helluva day, huh? “C’mon, big guy,” Bucky mumbles, soft and kind as he can. “Get yourself together, huh? Ain’t so bad, is it?”

Steve lifts his head, eyes all red-rimmed and glaring. _So cute._

Steve scrubs at his face, winces as he hits the bruises that are swelling up where the helmet didn’t protect him, and sits up a little straighter, visibly trying to pull himself together. “Christ. Sorry, just…” he lets out a shuddery breath.

"Helluva day?" Bucky says.

Steve's shaking, just a little. Probably about eighteen adrenaline comedowns hitting him all at once. "Helluva day," he agrees. "Sorry."

“S’okay, Stevie.”

Steve kinda looks like he wants to cry again, but he sets his jaw and resists the temptation. “Yeah. So. We’ve got a place to stay. Shelter, for now at least. A safe place.”

Bucky expresses the depth of his skepticism as best he can with half his face covered by an oxygen mask.

Steve laughs. “Safe being a… relative term, obviously. T’Challa has offered us sanctuary in Wakanda.”

Bucky closes his eyes. He opens them again. “Steve. I’m barely conscious and even I know that ‘sanctuary’ is probably actually a firing squad. The guy thinks I killed his dad.” He’s not even that upset, he’s just. He’s so damn tired.

Steve shakes his head. “He caught Zemo. He’s taking him in to Agent Ross right now. Gave us clearance to meet up with him in Wakanda. He’s gonna help us, Buck. He’s… He gave me this.”

Steve reaches down and holds up a book: battered. Red with a black star. Bucky feels visceral terror again, a lurch that Steve must see, because he quickly tucks the book out of sight, under the table. “Took it from Zemo. Said he didn’t think we’d want the CIA getting their hands on it.”

“Jesus,” Bucky pants. “Steve.”

“You wanna burn it?” Steve says.

 _“You bet your sweet, all-American ass I fucking do,”_ Bucky says fervently.

Steve laughs. “Okay. Okay, we’ll do that.”

Bucky sighs and rubs his eyes a bit. “Should. Look through it though. See if there’s any way to get this shit outta my head. But then.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay, yeah.” Steve reaches up and tucks Bucky’s hair back. “You can rest, Buck. Keep the mask on. T’Challa says that they can fix your breathing in Wakanda. He says you’re gonna be okay. You just gotta hold on. Okay?”

Bucky nods. He really is tired.

“You can sleep, Buck. I’ll keep watch.”

He doesn’t need any more encouragement.

 

 

 

He only wakes briefly when they land, just long enough for Steve to explain something that Bucky doesn’t really hear. He’s got a headache like a motherfucker, and then they give him an IV with something in it and he’s fucking out for the damn count.

 

 

 

He opens his eyes. Steve isn’t there. The beeping around him accelerates. _He’s coming around, adjust the dose._ The beeping decelerates. He closes his eyes.

 

 

 

“Jesus, Steve, what the hell happened?”

That’s Wilson’s voice.

Bucky tries to open his eyes. It seems like an unbearable amount of work.

“Stark.” And that’s Steve -- no. That’s the Captain’s voice. “But uh. It’s on me.”

That’s bullshit, Bucky wants to say. That’s _bullshit._

But he’s so tired.

 

 

 

He doesn’t open his eyes. He is warm. He can hear a pencil scratch-scratching not far away. He smiles. He sleeps.

 

 

 

He opens his eyes. The ceiling is white. Not hospital-tiles white, brilliant-white. Smooth white. He takes a deep breath, full. He takes another, stretching his ribs to the fullest capacity. He does it again, just for the sake of it. Fuck that feels nice. There’s no mask on his face either. He shifts his head on the impossibly soft pillow, looks at his left arm.

There is no left arm. There’s a bit of shiny shoulder, and then a neatly fitted cap of some kind of black cloth. But it doesn’t hurt. It even gives a tiny, half-hearted little hiccup of a diagnostic loop. That doesn’t hurt either, but it makes him sad. He looks the other way. He’s in a room, unmistakably a hospital and at the same time like no hospital he has ever seen. The clean, white space is more luxurious than anything Bucky has seen in his life, including the time he strangled a billionaire in his own home.

There’s an empty armchair, a little table with a sketchbook lying on it, as if someone just set it down. And beyond that…

A wall of windows. Bucky’s breath catches. He sits up, and his head only spins a little. Through the window, he can see mountains, high spire-like mountains like nothing he’s seen outside of Vietnam and China. They’re covered with lush greenery, their feet shrouded in mists, their tops lost in clouds.

Bucky swings his legs around, gets out of the bed, and crosses to the window. He’s barefoot, wearing white scrub pants and a tank top, but this is… he can’t not look at this. It’s the wildest, most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He can’t hear through the glass, in a way that makes him think that it’s thicker than it looks, maybe bulletproof. He doesn’t dare touch it though -- he doesn’t want to leave fingerprints, but he stares out through it, goggling.

A soft sound of feet on carpet makes him turn. It’s Steve, standing in the doorway with his big shoulders all hunched in.

Bucky grins. “Jesus, Stevie, you seen this?” He waves a hand at the window. “Holy shit. _Holy shit.”_

Steve looks like Bucky hit him over the head with a lead pipe. He's staring, not at the view outside, but at Bucky.  “Yeah, I--”

They both stop at the sound of a door opening in the room behind Steve. “Captain Rogers,” calls an accented voice that Bucky last heard through a black mask. “I thought you would want to--” And suddenly T’Challa is there in the doorway, behind Steve, who steps to one side, almost like he’s ready to throw himself on either Bucky or the king of Wakanda, depending upon who makes a move.

Bucky freezes, eyes wide. He’s one-armed, he’s barefoot, he’s not even wearing underwear under his scrubs, as near as he can tell. And this man, catsuit or no catsuit, is something else in a fight. And the last time they stood face to face…

The King of Wakanda crosses his arms over his chest and gives a slight bow. “Sergeant Barnes,” he says.

Bucky can feel himself goggling. James Buchanan Barnes was a suave motherfucker, according to all the source materials, including Bucky’s own memories. But James Buchanan Barnes was also just a kid from Brooklyn and this man -- this _actual king_ \-- just _bowed to him_. “Do I… I’m sorry. Do I bow back?” Is all he can think to say.

Steve smacks his palm against his face.

T’Challa smiles, something mischievous there in his eyes. “In Wakanda, we do not bow to kings or heroes, but _everyone_ bows to their elders.”

Bucky stares. Blinks. Then he barks out a surprised laugh.

“I am glad to see that you are feeling better, Sergeant Barnes,” T’Challa says, mischief still sparkling in his eyes.

Bucky, still chuckling, shifts his left shoulder. “Much. Thank you, your majesty.”

T’Challa shakes his head very slightly. “There is no need. I am merely doing what I can to right a wrong.”

There’s a sad half-smile on his face now, he can feel it. “There’s been a lot of wrong done, Majesty. I’m sorry about your father, I didn’t kill him but--”

“Bucky, it ain’t your fault,” Steve interjects, but Bucky just gives the dumb blond palooka a look.

 _“But._ I killed plenty of other folks. And if I hadn’t been around, your dad might still be alive. You oughta know that.”

T’Challa lifts his chin. “No,” he says. Simple like. “You are mistaken. If not my father, then someone else’s, and if I have learned anything these past few weeks…” T’challa swallows. “My father was no better than anyone else’s, and no less loved. He would not want to trade his survival if it meant someone else’s death. And as far as Zemo cared, my father was just a tool to an end. I think you know something of what that is, yes?”

Bucky swallows, suddenly hoarse. He nods. At some point he slipped into a rigid parade rest, and now he can’t pull out of it, like it’s the only thing holding him together.

“My father is beyond my help now, but you are not,” T’Challa says gently. “I will not disturb your rest, I wanted only to tell you that my doctors, technicians, and I have been through the files. We believe there will be no lasting damage from the chair, or the primitive cryogenics that were used on you.”

Bucky raises both eyebrows. “Primitive? I never seen tech like that anywhere else.”

T’Challa smiles thinly. “You have not seen Wakanda.” There is no hiding the pride in his voice. “My engineers are willing and eager to work with you on a new prosthetic, when, or if you feel ready.”

Bucky shrugs again, slower this time, thoughtful. He feels… lighter. Obviously. But it’s also…

He’s defenseless. If Steve wanted to overpower him, Bucky wouldn’t be able to stop him. If a SHIELD team kicked down the door, Bucky would have to go with them eventually. He’s helpless, and it’s…

It’s such a fucking relief, to be honest. That’s a guilty feeling, but ever since he woke up, on the Helicarrier, the thing that scared him most was the thought that he might hurt someone. Now he can’t hurt anyone. Well, he could, but he’s not unstoppable anymore. And Christ, that’s a fuckin’ relief.

“No thanks,” he says simply. “Or, at least. Not yet.”

“Very well,” T’Challa allows, nodding graciously. “Then I will leave you to your recovery. You are free to roam as you like, of course, though the doctors have requested that you stay… within their reach, should something go amiss. The work they have done to stabilize what is left of your arm is not intended for heavy use.”

“I’ll be careful of it,” Bucky promises.

T’Challa nods.

Steve steps in then, “T’Challa, we can’t thank you enough. Sheltering us, even for a short while--”

“You are safe here as long as you need,” T’Challa says, in a tone that brooks no demurrals. “Both of you. You are my guests.”

And then he’s letting himself out, leaving Steve and Bucky alone in the recovery room again.

Bucky turns back to the window, the spectacular view of the beautiful country. The clouds above are starting to give way, he thinks. He thinks of the old Arm, sparkling in sunlight, the way it used to purr through diagnostic loops, the way it felt, smashing through Lukin’s face, the way it felt, gently testing the ripeness of the plums at the market. _I’ll miss ya, Sweetheart_ , he thinks. Because he’s a fucking sap.

And speaking of. He turns to face Steve. The sun is breaking out from behind the clouds, dappling brilliance across the mountain scenery, lighting up patches of emerald green foliage. “Looks warm out there.”

Two parallel furrows appear briefly between Steve’s brows. “Uh, yeah. Like a sauna. Why?”

“You remember summers back in Brooklyn?” Bucky says. “I bet it don’t smell like garbage and cat piss here. Well.” He smirks. “Maybe cat piss.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, exasperated.

“I’m just sayin. This place got a fire escape?”

Bucky sees the moment that Steve works out what Buck is asking for. The little furrows clear. A wobbly smile appears. “There’s a garden on the roof. I’ll grab my sketchbook.”

 

Twenty minutes later, Bucky is stretched out on a reclining chair, his scrubs rolled up, his eyes closed. He’s starting to feel warm all the way through for the first time in seventy years. He can hear Steve’s pencil scratching away on the paper.

Bucky kind of misses the garbage smells. But the bird calls in the distance are eerily beautiful. He’s seen a couple of them up close in the hour or so that they’ve been lying here. Brilliant jewel-bright plumage in all shades, long tails and high crests and like something out of the science fiction he read when he was a kid.

Bucky turns his head. Steve’s got his knees pulled up like he’s small again, hunched around his sketchbook. Bucky wants to tell him it's bad for his back, just to see Steve make a face like he just bit a lemon.

Also, there’s a monkey on the wall behind Steve’s back, watching like it wants to steal Steve’s pencil. Bucky rolls onto his side, tucks his one arm under his head and says:

“Steve.”

“Hm.” Steve is busy, doesn't want to be distracted from whatever he's drawing.

“Steeeve.”

“Hm?” the query has an almost annoyed lilt to it.

“ _Stevie_.”

Finally, Steve puts down the pencil with a sigh. “What, Buck.”

Bucky can’t stop the dumb grin on his face. “There’s a monkey behind you.”

Steve snaps his head around in time to see the cheeky motherfucker swing out of sight with a little whoop. Bucky laughs.

“You scared him off!”

 _“You_ scared him off,” Bucky counters, still laughing. The sheer ridiculousness of it, the absurdity of this: the two of them, just two kids from Brooklyn, here in this foreign country with tech better than anything Buck Rogers ever dreamed up. It was a slow slog through hell to get here, and this is only a respite, but Bucky knows to appreciate what he can get while he can get it. “Jesus, pal, how in the hell did we end up here?”

“You said let’s go to the future,” Steve says, then spreads his hands wide, sketchbook in one hand, pencil in the other, knees still pulled up towards his chest. Bucky has a picture in his head of Steve just like this, but smaller, on those occasions when it was Bucky’s fault that they were in trouble, for once. “Well. Here we are.”

Bucky gives a tired, lazy grin at that. It’s not the same, not the old James Buchanan smirk, but it’s a close cousin. He’s older and wiser and sadder now than he was then. He knows, in a minute or two, that he’s going to need to start angling for Steve to let him talk to T’Challa. He’s too dangerous to be left free and wandering around. The trigger words are still out there. He’s a gun, locked and loaded and left out on the kitchen table. Guns belong in safes, and he belongs in cryo, where he can’t hurt anyone.

But that’s a conversation for later. Right now, he can just enjoy this moment of peace. There’s time to be cold later, but for now, he’s warm.

 

 

 

 

 

##  [Coda: Wololo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxFnVyNInfU)

\- “Wololo” by Babes Wodumo ft Mampintsha, 2016

 

There’s music when Bucky comes to: someone singing in one of the handful of languages he _doesn’t_ speak, but he doesn’t need to understand the words to recognize an _absolute banger_ of a song when he hears it. Bucky opens his eyes, blinks up at the strange pattern on the ceiling of the lab.

“Oh--” And then Steve is there, hovering over him, that big dumb face. “Hey pal,” he says, all breathless and happy about it.

What a dope. “Hey, sunshine,” Bucky says, and Steve looks like he might cry.

“How ya feeling?” he asks instead, all hopefulness and wide-eyed anticipation, like a goddamn kid.

It takes Bucky a moment to get his bearings. He must be just out of cryo, but he’s not cold. Cryo had always hurt, defrosting had always been agony. This is…

“I’m, uh...” He rubs his face with his one hand. He still feels a little drowsy, but more like he’d just woken up from a really good nap than an icy coma. He feels well-rested. He never felt well-rested coming out of cryo. He’s pretty sure he hasn’t felt well-rested since 1942. “...Good,” he finishes, surprised. “Feel good.”

Steve _beams_ at him. Bucky starts to sit up, but he’s all off kilter. Steve leans in with his big paws steady on Bucky’s good shoulder, helps him up, and on the other side--

There’s a girl, can’t be more than seventeen, dark skinned, with her hair all braided and done up in high buns on either side of her head. “Sergeant Barnes,” she says, her accent somewhere near Xhosa but not quite. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I am Shuri.”

 _“You’re_ Shuri?” he says. He can’t help being surprised. The king had said that Shuri was the one who would fix him, that she was his most trusted advisor, that when she got back, she would-- But she’s just a _kid._

Shuri grins wider; she’s clearly not offended by his surprise. If anything she looks like she’s looking forward to surprising him _more._

“She’s great, Buck, she’s-- she--”

Bucky looks over at him, and impossibly, Steve’s grin has widened. It makes him look so fucking young, and Bucky feels like there’s a helium balloon inflating in his chest. He snaps his head back to look at the kid.

“You fixed me?” he says, the question coming out high and shaky and--

She tips her head significantly towards his left side. “I’m just getting started, but ah… your trigger words won’t bother you anymore, Sergeant Barnes.”

Bucky takes a breath of free air for the first time in seventy years. “Fuck,” he says, and then, immediately: “Ah geeze, sorry, miss.”

She looks delighted. “Don’t worry about it,” she says, waving a hand. “I’ve got to go check some things. You two… catch up.”

Bucky looks back to Steve, and finds the idiot starting to turn pink at the ears. He looks like he’s about ready to bounce out of his skin.

“Alright pal,” Bucky says, swinging around so his legs are hanging off the table. There’s a faint smell of cryofreeze on him, but it’s nothing like the horrible chemical reek that used to linger on him at Hydra. “How long?” he asks, bracing for the bad news. He knew it might be a while before he saw Steve again, but he’d hated himself for leaving Steve alone.

“It’s September,” Steve says promptly.

Bucky gives him a look. “Of what year, punk?”

“2016,” Steve says, grin widening.

“No,” Bucky says, flat and unbelieving, because it can’t be. _It can’t be._

“Hand to God,” Steve assures him. “You know I can’t lie to save my life.”

“Unless we’re playing poker, you goddamn cheat,” Bucky says.

Steve can’t seem to stop smiling. “Well I wouldn’t lie about this. Here. Got ya an early birthday present--”

“Or a late one,” Bucky says.

Steve’s digging in his pocket, reaching under the table, and he comes back up with…

The book. And a lighter.

“You wanna have that bonfire, pal?” Steve says.

Bucky stares at it in silence. The black star is dull in the red leather, all of it is battered and worn and oh so very easy to destroy. His eyes go from that to the dull nickel shine of the lighter in Steve's other hand. Why does he even still carry one? He didn’t need asthma cigarettes anymore, and he’d never gotten a taste for smokes, but everyone had them, back in the day. Habit, Bucky supposes vaguely.

He feels a little numb.

“Buck?” Steve prompts gently.

He _does_ want to have the bonfire. He wants to toast goddamn marshmallows, find out what those suckers taste like. He wants to see the pages blacken and curl, embers glowing their way inward from the edges.

But right now, those offered treasures are just obstacles between him, sitting here, and what he _really_ wants.

He bats the book aside, hears it flop clumsily to the floor. Steve makes a faint _oof_ noise as Bucky gets his arm around Steve’s shoulders and hauls him in, really throwing his bodyweight into pulling Steve close. Steve's hands awkwardly catch himself on the medical table, pressed flat to either side of Bucky's hips, holding himself up presumably so he doesn't lose his balance and crush Bucky flat. Bucky wouldn't mind that, he thinks.

For a split second they both go tense. Bucky’s not used to this, to being this close. And neither is Steve, probably. Steve is between Bucky's knees, his chin hooked over Bucky's shoulder. Bucky feels like he might be buzzing again, but then, for no reason that he can fathom, it all goes quiet.

Oh good God Steve is so _warm._ Steve makes another soft, surprised sound as Bucky squeezes.  He hides his face in Steve's shoulder, and Steve's arms come up around him. They’re gentle at first, like Bucky might shatter, and then tighter, and tighter, and Bucky feels like all the worry in his body is being squeezed right out of him. Judging by the little hitching sigh in his ear, Steve feels something real similar.

For a long, long time, they just hold onto each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not the end. 
> 
> I've got over 20,000 words in a sequel document telling me that apparently I am not yet done talking about These Goddamn Nerds.
> 
> In addition to that, I've started posting [The B-Sides,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15845442/chapters/36903066) which will be a(n irregularly updated) collection of shorts and not-so-shorts in the same universe about everyone who _isn't_ Steve and Bucky. The first chapter is about Peggy ;)
> 
> If you want to know when Part Six starts posting, subscribe for updates or bookmark the series. If you want to listen to the actual playlist, start to finish, it's [on Spotify now.](https://open.spotify.com/user/zqsf1pytlcze3ld062ojtj6ny/playlist/3bvuoD4OwfKnUqjYOPIVGf?si=lxREz4ofReyCfknRABltPA) And if you're the kind of nerd who wants the Extended Soundtrack (which includes songs mentioned in the chapters, and also the current songlist for part 6) it's [here on Spotify.](https://open.spotify.com/user/zqsf1pytlcze3ld062ojtj6ny/playlist/4cO5vrDvCKErHEPtudEmEy?si=n6PcveBUSFm9m6zQ0wOnZA)
> 
> And of course, you are always welcome [in my tumblr lair.](https://girlbookwrm.tumblr.com/) You can drop me an ask about anything fic-related (including how drafting is progressing, yeah I'll allow it)
> 
> Finally, thanks again to the Gal Pal, who is alpha and beta and everything else too, and thanks to ALL OF YOU GUYS <3<3<3
> 
> (oh and ps i wrote the thing about bowing WELL before IW came out, and I liked it too much to cut it completely so i modified it don't @ me)


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